Lacy Ford is Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies at USC as well as Professor of History. As Senior Vice Provost and Dean, Ford's responsibilities include Faculty Development (hiring and retention, tenure and promotion, dean reviews), The Graduate School, On-line Learning Initiatives (Distributed Learning), the USC Press, Provost Communications and Information Resources, and special assignments.

Ford joined the Provost's Office in the Fall 2010. As Professor of History, Ford specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century southern history. He is twice a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellow and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellow. He is the author most recently of Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South published by Oxford University Press in September 2009. The book was reviewed by Ira Berlin in the September 20, 2009 issue of the New York Times Book Review.

Ford's earlier scholarship has earned a number of national and regional awards, including the Southern Historical Association's Francis Butler Simkins Book Prize for his Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1988), and the Organization of American Historians' Louis Pelzer Prize for his article "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry 1865-1900," in the Journal of American History. In addition to these fellowships and awards, Ford has served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of the Early Republic. In 2010-11, Ford was a Fellow in the SECAC ALDP program.