James Thomas
Associate Director of Publications- The Center for the Study of Southern Culture
James G. Thomas, Jr. serves as Associate Director for Publications at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. A writer, editor, and educator, his work explores the South through literature, oral history, and documentary expression.
Biography
James G. Thomas, Jr. began work at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture as managing editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture in 2003, and he has been the Center’s Associate Director for Publications since 2011. He is editor of Conversations with Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi), co-editor of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series (with Jay Watson), associate editor of The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and an editor of the online Mississippi Encyclopedia. His M.F.A. thesis project, The Lebanese in Mississippi, explores the collective memory of Lebanese Mississippians through oral history. Thomas is also the director of the Center’s annual Oxford Conference for the Book and the editor of Study the South, the Center’s online journal, and the Southern Register, the Center’s news magazine. Before joining the Center staff, Thomas worked as an editor for publications in New York and Oxford, Mississippi. Thomas has taught Southern Studies courses on the Mississippi Delta, and he also teaches research writing and classes on the craft of editing and the process of publication for the University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He is on the Board of Directors for the University Press of Mississippi and is past president (2019–20) of the Board of Governors for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He has a B.A. in English and Philosophy (University of Mississippi [1994]), an M.A. in Southern Studies (University of Mississippi [2007]), and an M.F.A., Documentary Expression (University of Mississippi [2020]).
Publications
A Mississippi Confluence
Edited by Annette Trefzer, Jay Watson, and James G. Thomas Jr.
Working closely in each other’s orbit in Mississippi, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright created lasting portraits of southern culture, each from a distinctly different vantage point. Taking into consideration their personal, political, and artistic ways of responding to the histories and realities of their time and place, Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence offers comparative scholarship that forges new connections—or, as Welty might say, traces new confluences—across texts, authors, identities, and traditions.
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (24 vols.)
The Mississippi Encyclopedia (print and online)
Conversations with Barry Hannah
Courses Taught
- LIBA 102 First-Year Seminar
- WRIT 370 “Understanding Publishing and the Editorial Process"
- First-Year Writing I WRIT 101
- SST 599 “The Mississippi Delta: Exploring the South’s South”
Education
B.A. English, The University of Mississippi (1994)
M.A. Southern Studies, The University of Mississippi (2007)
MFA Documentary Expression, The University of Mississippi (2020)