Wallace Golding is a native of Atoka, Tennessee and a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Illinois. His research is primarily interested in the history of racial activism in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. In particular, his research investigates how activist identities conform to or contest collective understandings of citizenship and belonging and how they construct histories and alternative worlds or futures.

Wallace also works with CLOUD, the Computational Laboratory for Online and Ubiquitous Data, housed in the Department of Communication, where he considers the role computational methods can play in rhetorical studies. He also serves as a peer leader for CMN 111/112, Oral and Written Communication I/II, and teaches courses in public speaking, visual rhetoric, and public writing.