Jennifer C. Core
Jennifer C. Core is the executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society. At THS, she was previously the director of membership and programs and the state coordinator of Tennessee History Day. Core is a folklorist and educator by training with masters degrees from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Indiana University, Bloomington. She formerly held positions at the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Grand Ole Opry archives. She is co-founder and director of the Tennessee Sampler Survey, a not-for-profit devoted to documenting Tennessee’s needlework heritage. Her areas of research have included Tennessee outsider and folk art, Middle Tennessee baskets, and West Tennessee Choctaw crafts. As a folklorist specializing in historical ethnography and material culture, she combines methodology from the fields of folklore and history. Core is the co-author, with Janet S. Hasson, of Tennessee Samplers: Female Education and Domestic Arts, 1800–1900 (University of Tennessee Press, 2025). Core is a former classroom teacher, a native of Knoxville, a resident of Nashville since 2001, and a proud Volunteer.
Nikki Ward
Nikki Ward is the director of Membership and Programs as well as State Coordinator for Tennessee History Day. She has training as a historian and a classroom educator with a BA in History and a MEd in Curriculum and Instruction from Middle Tennessee State University. Ward has worked in the museum field in Nashville, including working as a museum educator at Historic Travellers Rest. Most recently, she was a middle school social studies educator with Wilson County Public Schools.
Frances Kolb Turnbell
Frances Kolb Turnbell became senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly in 2019. In this capacity, she recruits authors to write articles for the THQ, reviews submitted manuscripts, and works with the editorial advisory board to provide guidance to authors whose work has been accepted. She is an historian of Early America and the Atlantic World whose research centers on the eighteenth century Lower Mississippi Valley. She earned her BA in history at Texas A&M University and her MA and PhD at Vanderbilt University. She is published in the Journal of Louisiana History and is a contributing author to Atlantic Environments and the American South (2020) and The American Revolutionary War in the West (2020). Her book, Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763–1803, was published in 2024 (Louisiana State University Press). She lives in Nashville with her family.
