About the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

Learn about the center's faculty, program offerings, and commitment to the documentation of the American South.

Exterior of antebellum red brick building with green shuttered windows and an observatory.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture

Who We Are

The University of Mississippi is classified by Carnegie as an R1 university, a designation reserved for the top 2.5% of universities in the nation. As part of a research-intensive university, our faculty are at the top of their field.

Being at an R1 university matters for students because it means they will have professors who bring exciting new discoveries into the classroom and give students a chance to work alongside them as they break barriers.

Center faculty, staff, and students emphasize the following areas of study: literature, history, anthropology, sociology, religion, documentary storytelling (including film, photography, and oral history), foodways, music, race and ethnicity, globalization, environment, gender and sexuality, movement and migration, and place-making.

What We Do

The Center investigates, documents, interprets, and teaches about the American South through academic inquiry and publications, documentary studies of film, photography, and oral history, and public outreach programs. The cross-disciplinary Southern Studies faculty and the undergraduate and graduate degree programs are the core of the Center’s work.

What We Offer

The Center offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees for students interested in interdisciplinary study of the American South. Find detailed information about our programs here.

Minor in Southern Studies

UG

Southern Studies, B.A.

Investigate and document the South.

Oxford

GRAD

Southern Studies, M.A.

Investigate and document the South.

Oxford

GRAD

Documentary Expression, M.F.A.

Investigate and document the South.

Oxford

Welcome from the Director

Welcome to one of UM’s most distinctive features—its Southern Studies program, housed at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Southern Studies is an interdisciplinary major that approaches the idea and the place of the U.S. South from a variety of angles. We study history and literature, sociology and photography, anthropology and music, food and film. Pursue your interests against the backdrop of a region that tells us even more about the nation.

Kathryn B McKee

Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, McMullan Professor of Southern Studies, and Professor of English

Mission, Values, and History

The mission of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture is to document, interpret, and teach about the U.S. South through critical research and public engagement.

Approaches and perspectives from various academic disciplines ground our understanding of the region, revealing the South’s cultural, historical, geographic, and demographic complexity.

At the heart of the Center’s mission is the academic program. Its undergraduate and graduate curricula strengthen the University’s commitment to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This interdisciplinary approach engages different pathways to knowledge and recognizes creative perspectives on the study of the region.

The Center engages broader audiences through publications, conferences, lectures, and documentary media. Because of its location, the Center focuses much of its work on Mississippi and the Deep South, while at the same time exploring the region as a whole, both in its U.S. and global contexts.

People enliven our mission. We commit to foster belonging by recognizing the diversity of the region we study.

We invite people of all races, classes, genders, sexual orientations, religious affiliations, ages, ethnicities, physical and neural abilities, national and regional origins, and other aspects of identity to fully engage with the Center, its programming, its academic components, and its institutes.

We commit to fair treatment, access, and opportunity for all. No individual should be disadvantaged because of their identity. We commit to challenging institutional and societal barriers to fair treatment.

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture began in the mid-1970s. Dedicated to strengthening humanities teaching and scholarship at the university through the exploration and documentation of the American South, a committee of the school’s faculty and administrators began planning the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 1975. In 1976 the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the University a consultant grant to aid in the planning, and in November of 1977 a three-day Eudora Welty symposium, featuring the author herself, marked the opening of the Center.

Students

The interdisciplinary nature of the Center has since its founding drawn students with a diverse range of interests who go on to pursue many different fields, both scholarly and in the arts, humanities, social justice, law, and business.

Throughout its history, the Center has emphasized its academic program as the foundation of its work. A National Endowment for the Humanities curriculum grant led to the creation of a Bachelor of Arts program in Southern Studies, which now enrolls 225 undergraduate majors, and the University of Mississippi supported the program through the appointment of faculty working in the Southern Studies program and in tenure-granting departments.

B.A. in Southern Studies

In 1986 the University established the Master of Arts program in Southern Studies. It remains the only Southern Studies M.A. program in the world. A Master of Fine Arts degree in Documentary Expression began in the fall of 2017 at the UM Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The M.F.A. program combines coursework in Southern Studies and interdisciplinary fields with advanced training in photography, film, and audio production.

Together, both graduate programs enroll between 25–30 students. Students benefit from a combination of courses in Southern Studies and courses from a range of other classes and encouragement to pursue interdisciplinary work. Since the 1980s over 400 students have completed Southern Studies degrees, and many more University of Mississippi students have taken Southern Studies classes.

M.A. in Southern Studies M.F.A. in Documentary Expression

Barnard Observatory, home to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, is named for Frederick A. Barnard and is one of the oldest buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.

"I have done some work here which will not die with me.”
—F.A.P Barnard, 1859

Barnard Observatory is the home of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and was built by enslaved labor between 1857 and 1859. It is one of three remaining antebellum buildings on campus where, like all of Oxford and the surrounding area, it sits atop ancestral Chickasaw land ceded by force with the signing of the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek in 1837.

Frederick A.P. Barnard, born in Massachusetts in 1809, graduated from Yale before teaching at Hartford Grammar School and the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. With the growing sectional divide over slavery, there was a reluctance of the Southern elite to send their sons to abolitionist Northern institutions and instead a need to establish universities in the South that taught a pro-slavery curriculum, requiring the luring of educators below the Mason-Dixon line. After meeting the president of the University of Alabama in 1837, Barnard accepted a position as the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy in Tuscaloosa.

In 1854, Barnard learned from a former student about an available position as the chair of the chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy departments at the upstart University of Mississippi, then only a decade old. In 1856, Barnard became the university’s first chancellor (the title was changed from president in 1858), and aimed to make the university a national leader in what was then called “experimental science,” favoring observation, experimentation, and scientific inquiry above rote recital. Securing $100,000 from the state legislature for his educational reforms and new scientific equipment, he set his sights on building his monument: a Greek revival observatory, modelled on Pulkovo Observatory in Russia and designed to contain a state-of-the-art barometer and the world’s largest refracting telescope.

A Northerner at a time of great division, Barnard was aware of a need to allay suspicion for abolitionist beliefs and held two enslaved workers, Jane and Nathan, who lived with him and his wife Margaret. On May 12, 1859 while the couple were away from Oxford, student S.B. Humphreys entered his home, beating and raping Jane. Once recovered she identified her attacker to Margaret who relayed it to her husband. A split faculty decision on Humphreys’ guilt kept him from being expelled, but Barnard’s personal letter to his parents lead to his withdrawal and subsequent rejection on reapplication in the following semester. Jane’s story is memorialised in a historical marker outside the front of the building.

Barnard’s decision to take the testimony of an enslaved woman over a white student, in counter to Mississippi law, was controversial and led to his investigation by the board of the university, who ruled him sound on the question of slavery after two days of testimony. It would be a temporary reprieve from his place in the sectional question: with the vast majority of the student body joining the University Greys in the wake of secession and only four students registered for the 1861 semester, the Unionist Barnard resigned as chancellor and returned to the North to teach at Columbia. The Civil War likewise prevented his telescope from ever completing his observatory. Commissioning a Massachusetts company to construct the lens in 1856, it was finished in 1861 but was unable to be dispatched South and remained in its workshop until being auctioned off to Northwestern University in 1863.

During the Civil War the building was used as a hospital for both Union and Confederate troops, surviving the razing of most of Oxford on account of Sherman’s friendship with Barnard. After his departure the building continued to house the Department of Physics and Astronomy with two telescopes, a smaller one that Barnard had acquired around 1856 and a larger one to be the building’s centerpiece (although not to the record size he had wanted), before separate physics and astronomy buildings were each completed in 1939 and the telescopes were moved to Kennon Observatory, where they remain. Barnard Observatory, split into east and west wings, housed Naval ROTC, the official residency of the chancellor, and the Alpha Xi Delta sorority, before the newly founded Center for the Study of Southern Culture found a home in its east wing in 1977. By 1986, the Center grew to be the only resident.

Receiving a National Register of Historic Places designation in 1979 and becoming a Mississippi Landmark in 1986, the century-old building of many faces needed architectural renovations. Fundraising $3 million, including $600,000 from the NEH, the renovations started in 1989 and were completed by 1992, stripping away many of the additional features added over the years and returning to Barnard’s original vision of the building. Its west wing accommodates the Tupelo lecture room, host of the SouthTalks lecture series and the Gammill Gallery of rotating exhibitions. The Southern Foodways Alliance occupies the floor where Barnard hoped his telescope would reside.

Further information:

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form (September 1977)
David Sansing The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History (March 1999)
Tom Howorth History is Lunch: F.A.P. Barnard: The Man and His Observatory (December 2019)

Written by Cosmo McGee, Southern Studies Graduate Student

Each year in this space the Center shares accomplishments from within the academic program and from across its affiliated institutes. We do so for three reasons: to reflect internally on what we have achieved, to share that information with broader audiences, and to help us set goals for the coming year that take up new challenges.

2020 Annual Report

University-wide Resources

Connecting people with opportunities and resources so they may engage the world and pursue their dreams.

Division of Access, Opportunity, and Community Engagement

Leadership and Support

We support the faculty and students in the Center of the Study of Southern Culture.

Meet Our Advisory Committee

Kathryn McKee

Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, McMullan Professor of Southern Studies, and Professor of English

James Thomas

Associate Director for Publications

Afton Thomas

Associate Director for Programs

Andrew Bryant

Administrative Coordinator I

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Communication Specialist

Bert Neal

Administrative Coordinator I

Core Faculty

Southern Studies faculty typically have a joint appointment in Southern Studies and another field, such as english, history, sociology, or anthropology.