Otis W. Pickett, Ph.D.

Affiliated Scholar, 2022-2024

Contact
Department of History
Office: STI 116 in Archives and Special Collections
Phone: STI 116 in Archives and Special Collections
Email: opicket@clemson.edu

Education
Ph.D., University of Mississippi (2013); MA, University of Charleston and The Citadel (2008); MA, Covenant Theological Seminary (2006); BA, Clemson University (2003)

Courses
History of Education and Clemson History

Research Interests
Southern Religious History; Clemson History; Race in the U.S. South

Otis W. Picket is a historian of religion in the U.S. South focusing on domestic missions to enslaved African American and Native American communities in South Carolina. His book Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Presbyterian Domestic Missionaries and Race in South Carolina, 1802-1874 addresses the roles that theology and ecclesiology played in shaping interracial interaction both within the nineteenth century Presbyterian church and southern society more broadly. He focuses on ministers John Lafayette Girardeau, T.C. Stuart, Thomas Donnelly, and John B. Adger whose missionary spaces held enslavement alongside “ecclesiastical rights” in awkward ways and hushed tones. Pickett examines these kinds of missionaries and mission churches in order to better understand the role that religion played in shaping the institution of slavery and laying the ideological and practical groundwork for racial segregation in the 1870s. Pickett is also interested in the ways that church polity and governance was applied to whites, African Americans and Native Americans differently based on race, civil status, and property ownership. He also teases out the way that missionaries use their experiences working in slave mission churches to justify a Lost Cause ideology into the late 1870s, which would leave a tremendous legacy in southern Presbyterianism over the next century.

Dr. Pickett has served in the School of Education at the University of Mississippi as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning, preparing Social Studies teachers for careers in the K-12 classroom from 2008-2013. He then served as the Director of Social Studies Education Programs at Mississippi College from 2013-2022 and was an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History and Political Science at Mississippi College. Dr. Pickett then accepted a position at Clemson University as the third University Historian in the institution’s history in July of 2022. He serves in the libraries as University Historian, Assistant Professor of Libraries, Chief Administrator of the Department of Historic Properties and is also a Clinical Assistant Professor in the College of Education, Department of Teaching and Learning at Clemson University.

Dr. Pickett is the recipient of the 2018 Humanities Educator Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award from Mississippi College in 2016 and the Outstanding Teacher Award from the School of Education at the University of Mississippi in 2013.

At Clemson, Pickett teaches History 1000 (Clemson History), provides historical tours of campus, researches and writes about Clemson history and presents his findings broadly to alumni groups, faculty/staff organizations, commissions, students, and the public. As University Historian, Pickett serves as a resource on issues of historic interpretation, representation, and commemoration for the Clemson community. He also helps curate the University’s historical records in partnership with the University’s special collections (Libraries); supervises the University’s Historic Properties group, which oversees the management, curation, and use of the University’s inventory of significant historical buildings and related properties and artifacts; he documents and interprets the University’s history, building on existing scholarship and research; he collaborates with the University’s administration on current or future history task forces or standing committees and serves as a public historian, being a point of contact and spokesperson for historical issues for the community and University.

Finally, Dr. Pickett is passionate about higher education in prisons and is the co-founder and co-director of the award winning Prison to College Pipeline Program, which is the first program in the state of Mississippi to offer tuition free, credit bearing college courses to incarcerated students Prison-to-College Pipeline Program | University of Mississippi (olemiss.edu)

Selected Professional Works

Books (In Production or Under Contract)

Southern Shepherds, Savage Wolves: Presbyterian Domestic Missionaries and Race in South Carolina, 1802-1874. University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC) October 2025.

Journal Articles & Book Chapters (Published)

“Teaching History in Mississippi: Lament as Pedagogy in an Era of Suffering, 2008-2022.” Editors Timothy Fritz and Trisha Posey. Lament and Justice in African American History: By the Rivers of Babylon. Lexington Books. Rowman and Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland), 2023.

“Southern United States.” Editors Kenneth R. Ross, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Todd M. Johnson. Christianity in North American in The Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2023.

"John Lafayette Girardeau and the Conflicting Personas of a Confederate Chaplain in Postwar South Carolina, 1865-1874.” Editors Ted Ownby, Darren Grem, and James Thomas. Southern Religions, Southern Cultures: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson. University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS) October 15, 2018.

“The Prison-to-College Pipeline Program: An Ethical, Education-Based Response to Mass Incarceration in Mississippi” Journal of African American History Co-authored with Dr. Patrick Alexander. Volume 103 Number 4 Fall 2018 https://asalh.org/document/journal-of-african-american-history/

“’We Were All Prisoners of the System’: William Winter, Susan Glisson, and the Founding of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation.” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South, The University of Southern Mississippi. Winter 2016 edition. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643248

“Father T.C. Stuart, the Monroe Mission and the Chickasaw of North Mississippi, 1822-1830.” Native South, The University of Nebraska Press. Summer 2015 edition. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/native_south/toc/nso.8.html

“We Are Marching to Zion: Zion Church and the Distinctive Work of Presbyterian Slave Missionaries in Charleston, South Carolina, 1849-1874.” The Proceedings, Journal of the South Carolina Historical Association. Spring 2010 edition. http://www.palmettohistory.org/scha/proceedings2010.pdf