Jennifer Ford is an Associate Professor in the J.D. Williams Library. Ms.Ford received her M.A. in History and her Masters of Library Science from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1997. She is currently working on her Ph.D in History at the University of Mississippi. Ms. Ford joined the Department of Archives & Special Collections in 1998 as a manuscripts curator. Since 2005 she has served as the Head of Special Collections and oversees the various units of Special Collections: the Mississippi Manuscripts Collection; the Blues Archive; the Southern Media Archive; and the Modern Political Archive. Ms. Ford's research interests lay in nineteenth century Mississippi history. She recently published a book with the University of Tennessee Press, The Hour of Our Nation's Agony: The Civil War Letters of Lt. William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Historical Society and is the Bibliographic Editor for The Journal of Mississippi History. She received an award of merit for her work from that society in 2007.