Charles A. Israel, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, joined Auburn University's history faculty in 2005. He teaches courses in American cultural and intellectual history, including the history and religion of the American South. A native Tennessean, he completed his BA in history from Sewanee: The University of the South and his MA and PhD at Rice University. He has taught high school history, worked as a graduate assistant editor at the Journal of Southern History, and been a faculty member at Texas A&M University and at Sewanee before coming to Auburn as an Associate Professor of History.

In 2004 the University of Georgia Press published Before Scopes: Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870-1925 . Eschewing the usual urge to view the 1925 trial of Dayton, Tennessee high-school teacher John T. Scopes as simply a brief spectacle of religious intolerance and a cultural clash emblematic of the 1920s, Before Scopes closely examines the religion and culture of Tennessee and the South in the preceding half-century to detail the trial's place in the development of southern religious attitudes towards social engagement. Before Scopes was recognized by the Tennessee Historical Commission and the Tennessee Library Association as the best book on Tennessee History for 2004.

Dr. Israel's research has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, and the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, where he was a fellow in the Young Scholars in American Religion program.

Recent publications include an article exploring the rhetoric and legal history of parent-child relations in the American South, titled "Who Owns Children?: Parents, Children, and the State in the United States South" which was published as part of a transatlantic history of children and citizenship. Dr. Israel also contributed an essay to the sesquicentennial history of the University of the South, in which he explores the place of professional (legal and medical) education at Sewanee in particular but in southern higher education more generally. His essay is "College or University: Professional Education at the University of the South, 1875-1915."

His current research includes a new book on the social and reformist engagement of southern white and black Christians, provisionally titled "A Southern Social Gospel: Religion, Reform, and the Riddle of Race."