PVCC Professor Honored with an Outstanding Faculty Award

Dr. Jennifer Tomás is a history professor at PVCC, specializing in political and United States history. She started working at the college in 2013 and is currently teaching HIS 122: United States History Since 1865 and HIS 127: Women in American History. After all her hard work and determination throughout her years at PVCC, Tomás has won the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV) Outstanding Faculty Award.  

According to the State Council’s website, “Her research focuses on modern American women, their civic and political engagement since the 1920s, and their efforts to secure women’s places in the formal narratives of American history during the twentieth century.” 

The SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award recognizes faculty from colleges and universities across the Commonwealth who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service while finding ways to integrate those things in meaningful ways. In order to be considered for this award, a faculty member has to be nominated by college leadership, have the support of peers and students, and be able to demonstrate excellence.  

“I guess you could say I’ve been preparing for this award since I arrived at PVCC in 2013 by being a dedicated member of the faculty, a caring teacher and colleague, and all-around hard worker who believes in the power of education to improve people’s lives – especially public education,” Tomás said. 

When asked about what this award meant to her, Tomás said, “It’s really gratifying to be recognized amongst so many peers who are such excellent teachers…. I’m taking this recognition as a sign that my work is valued and that what I teach, especially as relates to the history of American women, has relevance to students and peers.” 

Tomás also said that a big portion of the attention she is getting is due to her recently published book, which sealed the deal regarding meeting the scholarship part of the award criteria. “It’s really hard for a community college teacher who teaches five courses every semester to find time to do research or carve out space for the sustained focused attention that writing a full-length scholarly history monograph requires,” she said. Her book was also published by The University of North Carolina Press, which tends to get noticed. 

Her book, Reclaiming Clio: Making American Women’s History, 1900-2000, was published in December 2025. The book reconstructs the history of an intellectual movement that transformed the way historians and much of the reading public think about history. Reclaiming Clio is a sweeping narrative, charting 100 years of struggle to develop, legitimize, and integrate the history of American women into the formal narratives of American history and the curricula of American colleges and universities. “I see myself as carrying on that legacy as an educator,” Tomás said, “It is an endeavor that is still very much in need of new converts – students and teachers – to keep it vital.” 

Tomás is looking forward to sharing her book with the world: “It comes out at a very timely moment, when American history is under assault by ideologues who seek to censor, sanitize, and homogenize our history by deleting inconvenient truths and historical narratives that run counter to their political designs or cultural values.”

She said, “My book shows how whole fields of history are built from the ground up, archive by archive, book by book, syllabus by syllabus, student by student over generations. The people, women included, need their history, unvarnished, in all its diversity.”

“The book is the product of approximately seven years of original archival research, writing, reflection, and revision.”

Now that her book has been published, Tomás plans book talks, interviews and more locally and hopefully around the country. She recently presented a paper related to her book at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, and back in December 2025, she gave her first book talk here at PVCC. Tomás said she would like to thank “V.P. Leigh Keniston, my peers and former students for saying such darn flattering things about me. PVCC and Virginia have generally been very, very good to this upstate New Yorker. I feel very lucky and very privileged to have landed in this little corner of the world.”