Martha Regalis | North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Instructor of Humanities

Durham

Joined NCSSM in August 2001

Dr. Martha Regalis is a seventh-generation South Carolinian who grew up on a family farm in the Upstate that her family had owned for generations. An ancestor who fought in the American Revolution and who died in 1812, was buried in a historic cemetery on the property, and the terraces in its fields were designed by her great-grandfather. Perhaps because of this deep connection to the past, living history has always been literal for Dr. Regalis and the poetics of the historical and literary imagination have colored her life, her research, and her love of teaching.

She is a member of the Humanities Department and was the managing director of the NCSSM Summer Bridge Program, which she helped design as an outgrowth of her work with the NCSSM Writing Program. She also designed and taught in the humanities component of Bridge. Dr. Regalis has served as a Coordinator for the NCSSM Humanities Department, as well as a departmental Convener for Curriculum and Assessment.

She has designed and teaches a number of interdisciplinary courses, including Topics in U.S. History, American Literature, American Studies, Western European Cultural Studies, British Literature and Culture, Modern World Fiction, 20th-Century Philosophy and Literature, and Writing Lives: Autobiography, History, the Novel, and Film. She co-wrote and won two separate, million-dollar “Teaching American History” grants from the U.S. Department of Education (2002-2010). These gave North Carolina teachers the opportunity to participate in residential seminars and archival research with scholars from area universities and the N.C. Museum of Art, among other partners. From 1994-1998, Dr. Regalis was a liaison to the ASCD’s National Consortium on Interdisciplinary Learning, offering workshops on interdisciplinary curricula to U.S. teachers. She has won numerous NEH grants for summer study in venues from the Newberry Library in Chicago, to Emory University in Atlanta, Duke University in Durham, and Columbia University in New York. She has presented papers at the MLA, the SCMLA, the Council for Hispanic Studies, and elsewhere, and has published in various journals, including The Southern Review and Restoration.

Dr. Regalis earned a B.A. with High Honor in English from Clemson University, in Clemson, South Carolina, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from LSU, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She did postdoctoral study in history and philosophy at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, Illinois. She is the recipient of three Chancellor’s Teaching Awards for Excellence – Excellence for Contributions in Scholarship (2009); Outstanding Teacher (2013); Excellence in Contributions to Classroom Innovation (2017), as well as the UNC System’s Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020-2021). Dr. Regalis regards teaching as an extension of the journey of life and of her own education, whose end, like the horizon, and like her own quest for excellence, is ever-receding.

BA, English-Spanish, Clemson University
MA, English-Spanish, Louisiana State University
PhD, English-Spanish, Louisiana State University
Post-Graduate Study, History and Philosophy, Northern Illinois University