The Center for the Study of Southern Culture has a long tradition of producing written scholarship on a vast variety of subjects within numerous disciplines and in a wide number of formats. Among the most celebrated are the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the 24-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture series.
Center faculty continually produce new scholarship in their respective fields, Living Blues was founded as America’s first blues publication and has since set the standard for blues journalism around the world, and the Center’s newsletter, published three times a year, the Southern Register, provides readers with Center-related news and updates on a variety of topics.
The Southern Register
The Center’s newsletter for Center friends, the Southern Register, is published three times a year and provides readers with Center-related news and updates.
If you would like to receive the Register through the mail, please email jgthomas@olemiss.edu.
Current Issue — Spring 2025
Congratulations to our graduates who are featured in this issue.
The cover of this issue is the beautiful painting done by local artist and friend Blair Hobbs for the Thirty-First Oxford Conference for the Book, set for April 2-4. Look inside for an introduction to the new class of graduate students, a day-in-the-life with undergraduate Gibson Russell, and to learn more about new accolades for Ralph Eubanks.
In this issue, we welcome several new hires, John Rash and Melanie Ho’s documentary film “Our Movement Starts Here” makes its Mississippi debut, and Ann Abadie is remembered as a visionary at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
This issue features our May graduates, SST 402 students share their capstone projects, and alumna Amanda Malloy spotlights the struggle of South Carolina’s basket weavers.
In this issue, learn all about the upcoming 30th Oxford Conference for the Book set for April 3-5; Southern Studies alumna Greta Koshenina combines her passion for Ancient Rome and the modern South in her role as assistant curator and collections project manager at the University Museum; and Southern Studies alumna Kate Medley publishes a book of photographs showcasing hidden gems of the South.
In this issue, Adam Gussow shares his experience with the prison-to-college pipeline program, M.F.A. student Lucy Gaines shares her travel stories, and Rex Jones focuses on loss and leaving in his final film for SouthDocs.
In this issue, Ted Ownby retires after 35 years, an open letter to our Southern Studies graduates, and Charles Reagan Wilson explores the Southern way of life in his new book.
In this issue: the Oxford Conference for the Book is set for March 29-31; Allison Grant negotiates beauty and heartbreak through her photographs of Tuscaloosa, Alabama (on display now in the Gammill Gallery); and alumnus Ben Cannon uses his Southern Studies background for his role as a field producer for the Discovery Channel. Read all this and more in the latest issue.
In this issue, we welcome our new graduate students as well as our new operations assistant, Jodi Skipper talks about her book, and we announce Daina Ramey Berry as the Gilder-Jordan lecturer.
In this issue, we announce the lineup for the upcoming Oxford Conference for the Book, Southern Studies alumna Natoria Kennell-Foster shares her passion for baking, and we welcome filmmaker Melanie Ho to the SouthDocs team.
In this issue, the Southern Foodways Alliance welcomes Zaire Love as the Pihakis Filmmaker, we celebrate our spring graduates who prevailed over the challenges of the pandemic, and Katie McKee chats with former director Charles Reagan Wilson about the South, in brief.
In this issue: the list of SouthTalks events for spring, a Southern Studies alum puts his degree to work researching New Orleans street names, and Zaire Love interviews Brian Foster about his new book.
Editor’s Note: As a result of the disruption and cancellation of Center events caused by the COVID-19 pandemic this spring and summer, we have chosen to move the Southern Register to online publication for this Spring-Summer 2020 issue. We’ll return to our usual print publication this upcoming fall, but until then we’ll publish weekly stories that would usually appear in the print edition of the Southern Register. Check the Center website and social media each Monday for new “Southern Register Stories” and announcements of upcoming events.
Director’s Column
Public writing in the age of a pandemic seems to call for pithy wisdom and broad hints at having become reacquainted with the more meaningful parts of life. Those sentiments are well and good if you can muster them, but the truth is that life under the coronavirus is also frustrating and tiresome and, as I write this column in mid-May, also deeply uncertain. Like all of you, we have felt a range of emotions at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, having just last week sent our graduates out into the world without ceremony under the banners of “cancelled” and “rescheduled.” As did the rest of academia, the University of Mississippi suspended in-person instruction in mid-March, completed the semester online, and now hesitates over fall plans, even as the summer heat moves into a mostly empty campus.
But at the Center we are planning for a vibrant future, with or without the virus, with or without a resumption of “normal life” any time soon. Out of this unusual time, we carry forward more than anxiety and frustration.
Center Director Katie McKee
It is true that remote instruction was sometimes awkward and occasionally technologically mystifying, but it is also the case—counterintuitively—that many of us built more personal relationships with some of our students and discovered valuable uses for online platforms that will a play a role even in our physically reconstituted classrooms. Particularly in Southern Studies 101, when we shifted the readings to being about COVID-19 and its effects on the South, students perked up and joined in the conversation, discovering new ways to see the local and the global as inextricably linked.
It is true that Zoom faculty and staff meetings now resemble games of Hollywood Squares, but they also take us into each other’s homes where we chat with small children (have your sunflowers come up yet, William?) and meet pets (Fern, my personal assistant). If you would like to see how some of us have been spending our time, check out this informal “what have you been reading and doing, SST?” video:
(Thank you, John Rash!) Zoom may also have sparked a new tradition, the “Zoom-union” of Center faculty, staff, and alumni that we held on graduation weekend, a wild but thoroughly enjoyable mash-up defying time and space. (Thanks, class of 2011, for the idea and for leading the way.)
It is true that much of our fall programming, including the SouthTalks lecture series, will go online in the fall in anticipation of a continued need for social distancing, but we are excited about the opportunity new venues will give us to connect with more of you who can seldom join us in person. In particular, we anticipate spotlighting our fall programming theme, “Voting Rights and Community Activism,” and showcasing the scholarship of Center faculty, five of whom have new books just out or nearly completed. We hope, as well, to feature the documentary thesis projects of our three recent MFA graduates whose public showings of their work were circumvented by COVID.
It is true that events connected to our Future of the South Initiatives have been delayed, but those faculty, classroom, and community-centered projects will continue in a variety of forms because the topics they engage remain central to life in the contemporary South and will certainly help to shape the region as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. The first focuses on “Movement and Migration”; the second is our collaboration with the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi and its emphasis on telling the stories of LGBTQ southerners; and the newest will be a multimedia study of climate change in the Deep South, called “Flood Gates.” But the pandemic issues many imperatives, not the least of which is that we study the virus itself, and the economic, physical, and mental havoc it is unevenly wreaking. Look for programming in the future that will help us make to sense of the now.
And it is very much true that we miss campus, we miss each other, and we miss seeing many of you. But being away has really only reminded us of our attachment to Barnard Observatory as home base. We’ll meet you back there soon.
Katie McKee Center Director
Southern Studies Students Earn Degrees and Awards
Despite the strange way the semester ended, Southern Studies students worked hard, even through a pandemic.
May 9 was the official graduation date for three undergraduate majors and five graduate students, who either earned their MA or MFA degrees. Several of those students also earned Southern Studies Awards.
Olivia Terenzio, theSouthern Foodways AllianceNathalie Dupree Graduate Fellow, was the first remote thesis defender on April 16 for her master’s thesis, “Feijoada and Hoppin’ John: Foodways, Collective Identity, and Belonging in Brazil and the American South.”
Her research efforts earned her the Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for outstanding thesis, which compares two African-derived dishes—feijoada in Brazil, and Hoppin’ John in the United States —and how each has been used to construct national, ethnic, and regional identity narratives within these two societies of the Americas.
Terenzio, who also received the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Graduate Student in Southern Studies Award, became interested in the subject of rice and beans after spending a few months in Brazil in 2018 and observing differences in collective identity narratives between Brazil and the US South, where she grew up.
On April 17, Hilary Word defended her thesis “Post-Soul Speculation: An Exploration of Afro-Southern Speculative Fiction,” which looks at the genre of fiction that encompasses works where the setting involves supernatural, futuristic, or other imagined elements.
Word, who considered the supernatural and futuristic worlds through the lens of literature, said she was thrilled to learn she earned the Sue Hart Prize for outstanding paper in gender studies.
“I’m honestly still in shock; I had no idea that I was even being considered,” Word said. “Just the recognition is amazing, but then to top it off with an actual prize is really incredible. “I feel so humbled and so grateful that my work has been recognized in this way. It’s truly an honor.”
April 20 was a big day for James G. Thomas, Jr., when he defended his thesis in preparation for earning his third degree from the University of Mississippi, this time a Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Expression.
Thomas began his research on the history of Lebanese communities in the Mississippi Delta in 2006, when he was working on his master’s degree in Southern Studies. That effort turned into his master’s thesis, and he expanding on that same topic for his MFA.
“The Lebanese in Mississippi: An Oral History,” is a project that “documents and interprets the lives of first- and subsequent-generation Lebanese Mississippians whose families immigrated to the state looking for a better life.” Thomas has built an extensive online oral history documentary project that includes audio portions of oral history interviews, narrator biographies, photographs and documents shared by those narrators, a history of Syrian-Lebanese migration to the state, and a four-part audio documentary.
After graduating with his MA in Southern Studies in 2019, Hooper Schultz decided to remain at the University of Mississippi for another year and earn hisM.F.A. in Documentary Expression. On April 28 he defended his thesis “The Southern Front: Gay Liberation Activists in the US South and Public History through Audiovisual Exhibition.”
Schultz conducted oral histories through a series of face-to-face interviews across the Southeast over the course of three years and said he learned so much since the Carolina Gay Association and Southeastern Gay Conferences have been written about and studied very little up until now.
He is continuing his education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a doctoral student in history.
Zaire Love’s films have been shown at the various film festivals across the nation.
Zaire Love finished her MFA film and defended her thesis April 28. She won the Ann Abadie Prize for best documentary project with“The Black Men I Know,” which follows an uncle and nephew whose neighborhood in Memphis “introduced and inducted them into violence, incarceration, and hustle.” It is a creative documentary using experimental elements to tell their story; an “honest attempt to explore the depth of emotional suppression in black men because of grief, the manifestations of grief, and how these manifestations also affect the ones these black men love the most, their families.”
On May 18th, her film“Soulfed,” made its TV debut on WKNO in Memphis.
The other graduate student to win an award is Christian Leus, who won the Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for outstanding paper by a first-year graduate student. Her paper, “Reporting and Creating Violence: Press Coverage of a 1930s Murder” was written for SST 602, taught by Ted Ownby.
This year, four undergraduate students were recognized for their impressive writing abilities.
Claire Bonvillain is the 2020 Gray Award winner.
Claire Bonvillain won the Gray Award for her outstanding undergraduate paper, “‘Working Men in a Wild Place’: An Environmental History of Houma, Louisiana” for Jay Watson’s ENG 458 Southern Environmental Literature course, where students wrote environmental histories of their hometowns.
“I chose to write about Houma, where I was born—although I didn’t grow up there—because I knew that Houma’s people are very connected to the environment both recreationally and for their livelihoods, through activities such as fishing, crabbing and shrimping,” said Bonvillain, who was also a UM Taylor Medalist. “South Louisiana is also impacted by environmental events like hurricanes and flooding, and has been affected by environmental damage such as oil spills. I thought that it would make for a really interesting paper to explore all of these factors, and I also wanted to learn more about the place where my family is from. Even knowing these things about Houma, I wasn’t prepared for how much I would learn.”
Bonvillain, who graduated from the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College with an English degree, said her favorite part of writing the paper was interviewing family members, but she never expected her work would earn her an award.
“I learned a lot about their lives and their experiences with environmental change, and it was really cool to get to talk to them about their hometown,” she said.
Addie Paige Pratt, a freshman from Corinth in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College majoring in integrated marketing communications, won the Sarah Dixon Pegues Award for outstanding paper in music for her original musical composition and paper, “In Honor of Ida B. Wells and Her Legacy: ‘Colorblind,’” written for the Honors section of SST 101 with Jodi Skipper.
Pratt said she wanted to do something creative for her final project combining her love of songwriting and music.
Addie Paige Pratt won the Sarah Dixon Pegues Award for her music composition and paper honoring Ida B. Wells.
“I thought it would be really interesting to compose a song honoring Wells’s legacy and reference some of the experiences that influenced her writing,” Pratt said. “I actually sat down to write the song immediately after the idea came to mind, and I finished it in about thirty minutes. The title of the song, “Colorblind,” is such an important message, because it is a metaphor for a racist mind perceiving the world and it’s people as only black and white, when in reality, everyone is a part of a hugely complex makeup of humanity. The color of our skin certainly should not be used as a catalyst for judgment and hate.”
William Nieman won the Peter Aschoff Award for outstanding paper in music for his honors thesis,“Country Fun: A Cultural History of Opryland, USA, Nashville, and the Suburban South,” directed by Ted Ownby.
His thesis was informed by research he did for two months last summer as in intern at theCountry Music Hall of Fame and Museumin Nashville, Tennessee. His research was funded by the Julian and Kathryn Wiener Endowment through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
“It’s where I did the research that allowed me to change my topic and where I had conversations with some of my co-workers that impacted how I thought about country music,” Neiman said. “I’m also surprised how much of the thesis was about Nashville itself, and my time at the Hall of Fame definitely allowed me to get a glimpse of what life in the city is like.”
Rachel Winstead won the 2020 Coterie Award.
Rachel Winstead won the Coterie Award for outstanding undergraduate paper for “Basements Below the Sanctuary: A Story of the Church School,” which was her honors thesis, directed by Ralph Eubanks.
Winstead, a native of Hattiesburg, said her Southern Studies courses taught her how the stories of the past constantly influence the present.
“When I took a southern literature class, I was amazed by the stories of southern authors,” Winstead said. “For the first time, I understood the literature I was reading on a personal level. Through southern literature, I gained a new lens to see my place and myself within the larger world. I gained a deeper understanding of people by studying the place I grew up.”
Written By Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Study the SouthPublishes New Essay on the Economic South
In this essay,“More Pricks Than Kicks: The Southern Economy in the Long Twentieth Century,”Peter A. Coclanis traces the evolution of the southern economy over the “long twentieth century,” which in his view began around 1865 and is not yet over. During this lengthy period, the economy of the region was shaped—and limited—by factors that originated much earlier with the creation of an economic order based upon racial slavery and export-oriented plantation agriculture. His argument, that is to say, is that it has been very tough for the South to deviate from the “path” taken early in the region’s history. To Coclanis, the region’s difficulties in developing economically are usefully framed in Beckettian terms.
“We are incredibly pleased to publish this illuminating work on the history of the southern economy,” said James G. Thomas, Jr., editor ofStudy the South. “In this long-form essay, Coclanis exposes how ‘the legacy of plantations and racial slavery have limited the South’s developmental possibilities ever since,’ shedding new light on how the historical problems of the southern past continue to affect the southern present.”
Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor and Director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He works mainly in the areas of economic history, demographic history, and business history, and has published widely, particularly on the US South and on Southeast Asia, includingThe Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920(1989); with David L. Carlton,The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development(2003);Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Durée(2006); and with Sven Beckert, Barbara Hahn, and Richard Follett,Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities(2016).
Upcoming essays inStudy the Southinclude a “reading” of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, by Margaret Pless, and an extended meditation by GerShun Avilez on labor, mobility, and the precarity of Black citizenship as explored in Douglas Turner Ward’s 1966 experimental play,ADay of Absence.
Study the South(www.studythesouth.org) is interested in scholarship that couples the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic with the current national protest movement against racial violence as a lens to examine the past and present culture of the South. Topics for consideration could include but not be limited to healthcare and economic inequality, civil rights and racial violence, and political power and white privilege.
We welcome a variety of thoughtful responses to how we understand, live in, and respond to the changing South. Proposals for essays, curated roundtable conversations, video and photography projects, interviews, activist projects, and pedagogical reflections are welcome.
Contact James G. Thomas, Jr. at jgthomas@olemiss.edu to submit proposals or complete works, or for more information.
Study the South is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, online journal, published and managed by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The journal, founded in 2014, exists to encourage interdisciplinary academic thought and discourse on the culture of the American South, particularly in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, music, literature, documentary studies, gender studies, religion, geography, media studies, race studies, ethnicity, folklife, and art.
By Rebecca Lauck Cleary on May 29th, 2020
Two Southern Studies Faculty Honored for Excellence in Teaching
Catarina Passidomo Wins Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen, and Jessie Wilkerson Honored with the Mike L. Edwards New Scholar Award
It’s not every day that a geography professor is stumped by a pop quiz about a Bulgarian skyline, but that’s how Catarina Passidomo discovered she would receive the 2020 Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen.
Passidomo,Southern Foodways AllianceAssistant Professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of anthropology, found out she was being honored with the award during a Zoom meeting with Donald Dyer, associate dean of faculty and academic affairs for theCollege of Liberal Arts.
“I assumed this had something to do with my tenure file, so I was a little alarmed when our meeting started with a quiz—he asked me to identify the Eastern European city pictured in his virtual background,” Passidomo said. “It was Sophia, the capital of Bulgaria, and I guessed incorrectly. I thought,‘Oh, no, is this how tenure is determined?’He then switched the background to a photograph of the three recipients of last year’s teaching awards and asked ‘Now do you know why I wanted to speak with you?’ At that point, I guessed correctly.”
Dyer said Passidomo is well respected and admired by students and colleagues alike.
Catarina Passidomo
“Dr. Catarina Passidomo has demonstrated for years that she is one of the finest teachers in the College of Liberal Arts, indeed on our campus broadly, and this year her strong nominations for the Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen bore witness to her professional acumen in this area,” said Dyer.
Passidomo, who will have her name added to award plaques in the dean’s office and who will receive $1,000, was surprised and honored by the announcement, “and relieved to learn I hadn’t blown my chance at tenure by misidentifying a skyline,” she said.
In 1984 Cora Lee Graham of Union City, Tennessee, established an endowment and directed that the proceeds from her gift be used “to help retain your better professors who teach the freshman classes” in the College of Liberal Arts.
She knows there are many outstanding teachers to come before her, as many of them are her colleagues in Southern Studies and sociology and anthropology, so she doesn’t view herself as the outstanding teacher, just one who is being recognized this year.
“I have a lot of contact with freshmen in my introductory courses in Southern Studies and human geography, and I know that teaching freshmen can be both a privilege and a challenge,” Passidomo said. “Beyond just exposing them to class material, we’re really orienting them to a whole new way of being a student, to negotiating lots of conflicting demands on their time and attention, and to figuring out how they fit into this place. That process can be daunting for both students and their professors, but it also presents an opportunity to directly engage students with class material that feels relevant to their lives in this particular place and time. Because of the classes I teach, it’s relatively easy to ground course content in ‘the real world’ and to provide them with tools and a new vocabulary to help them make sense of it.”
Of course, everything is a bit different now, since everyone is apart.
“We’re all struggling to balance teaching and learning with being in a place where neither of these things typically happen, where there are other people or pets or jobs making demands of us, possibly, and where we may have legitimate worries about the physical and economic health of our loved ones and communities,” Passidomo said. “Logistically, there was a bit of a learning curve—maybe for the students, and definitely for me. It was also sad to not get to see one another again and to have in-person classes end in a way that seemed abrupt. But we all understand, I think, that we’re living through a very weird and scary time, and the least we can do is try to figure out how to finish a semester online, and so we did.”
Passidomo added that effective and empathetic teaching can only happen when faculty themselves are supported. Since both Jeff Jackson, chair of sociology and anthropology, and Katie McKee, director of the Center, have won this award in the past, Passidomo knows they understand.
“I’m really lucky to be a part of two terrific departments with Southern Studies and sociology and anthropology, and to have the support and collegiality of the Southern Foodways Alliance,” she said. “I’m surrounded by really smart, compassionate people who are changing the world through their teaching, research, and service. I have colleagues in both departments who won Liberal Arts research awards this year—Annie Cafer in sociology and Jessie Wilkerson in Southern Studies and history. Dr. McKee and I co-teach SST 101 often, and I have learned a tremendous amount from her. She has certainly made me a better teacher, and teaching with her is way more fun than teaching alone.”
Jessie Wilkerson, assistant professor of history and Southern Studies, learned about the College of Liberal Arts Mike L. Edwards New Scholar Award when she checked her email, and let out a “whoop” when she read its contents.
“I hadn’t expected to open an email with news of an award,” said Wilkerson, who is also the graduate advisor. “I thought it was just another COVID-related email, so I was delighted for good news.”
The award is presented annually to untenured, tenure-track professorial-rank faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts who are within six years of their initial tenure-track academic appointment and who have demonstrated exemplary performance in research, scholarship, and/or creative achievement. Depending on the quality of the pool of nominees, up to four awards will be available, with one each chosen from the areas of natural sciences and mathematics, social sciences, humanities, and fine and performing arts. The ideal recipients must have significantly enhanced the scholarly reputation of the college and university through exceptional contributions to their disciplines and demonstrated a positive impact on the success of their department. Each recipient receives a $1,000 cash prize and a medal.
Jessie Wilkerson
Wilkerson said being nominated by the chairs of her department, Katie McKee and Noell Wilson, is an honor because those are people who understand what she does, day in and day out.
Like everyone else, Wilkerson dealt with the difficult shift to remote classes because she knew the classroom dynamic couldn’t be recreated. Since both of her classes were discussion based, she had a relationship with the students, and they had relationships with one another. When the announcement was made to shift online, “we took some time to mourn that nothing about the new version of the class would be the same—how could it be? I’m still sad that we didn’t get to finish out the semester in person, but we did our best with online discussions.”
This was especially true for her US women’s history course, where she and the students got to know each other’s interests and questions that really mattered to them.
“We often had a good time. We delved into difficult topics, and students often lingered after class or walked with me to my next class” Wilkerson said. “Some of them were falling in love with women’s history. I recognized it because I acted exactly the same way the first time I took a women’s history class in college—joyful, exasperated, frustrated that I hadn’t been taught women’s history before then, eager to learn as much as possible.”
Recently, Wilkerson also received an honorable mention for the Philip Taft Labor History Prize forher bookTo Live Here You Have to Fight:How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, which focuses on women’s activism in Appalachian labor, antipoverty, welfare rights, women’s, and environmental movements in the 1960s and ’70s, drawing heavily on oral history accounts of trials and tribulations in order to highlight the lived experience of participants.
Wilkerson said she will always cherish the collaborative work that was the backbone of those courses.
“I’ll be forever grateful to the Southern Studies program, especially the colleagues who pushed me and the students who inspired me,” she said. “I’m a scholar who sees her academic work linked strongly with contemporary issues and struggles for fairness and justice. More than any other space on campus, I’ve gotten to explore what that means in Barnard—whether it was co-teaching with Jodi Skipper, Catarina Passidomo, Brian Foster, or Barb Combs, or imagining with my students what community-engaged work looks like in Mississippi, or in long hallway conversations with Katie McKee, Afton Thomas, and many others. At the Center, I found the freedom and often the inspiration to be a more creative scholar than when I arrived.”
Written by Rebecca Lauck Cleary
SouthDocs Filmmaker Releases Documentary About Hurricane Camille
Rex Jones, who has been a documentary filmmaker with theSouthern Documentary Projectsince 2011, produced his most recent film,Camille: The Original Monster Storm, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary ofHurricane Camilleand its impact on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Jones, a native of Hickory, Mississippi, with an MFA in science and natural history filmmaking, is particularly “interested in the intersection of nature and culture.” He noted, “Given my position with SouthDocs at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, a film about the fiftieth anniversary of Hurricane Camille was a good fit for my background and interests.”
In spite of her monster wrath, Camille’s legacy, especially when juxtaposed with that of the much more recent Hurricane Katrina, is an overshadowed, if not forgotten event in Mississippi history. As Jones remarked, “Camille was really one of the first big tests of resilience for the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in many ways prepared the Coast for Hurricane Katrina. When Camille hit, there was no such thing as NEMA, there was no such thing as FEMA, there were no cell phones. Radar was just beginning to be used. So, the lack of technology, or the more primitive technology, provoked a very different response during Camille than it did during Katrina.”
Rex Jones poses in front of the ‘Camille’ promotional poster.
Although both hurricanes were brutal in their own right, the film highlights how they were notably different from each other. Jones explained, “Camille was more of a wind event and Katrina was more of a water event. With Camille, you did have storm surges and tidal waves and that sort of thing, but it was really the winds that did the damage in Hurricane Camille. It was a very fast-moving storm with a small eye, so it blew right through, whereas Hurricane Katrina had a very large eye and was a very slow-moving storm, so it brought a lot of rain. It was Katrina’s water damage that was so devastating.”
With the golden fiftieth anniversary last fall, and the human tendency to “ascribe a lot of importance to these big anniversaries,” it “seemed natural,” Jones said, “to take a look back at this—one of the first and worst natural disasters on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in recorded history.” Jones was inspired not only by the symbolic significance of the fiftieth anniversary, but also the pressing need to collect and document the first-person stories of those who lived through Camille while they are still alive to tell them. Finding people who were still around and could speak about their experience proved difficult, butCamillebrings together first-person accounts with extensive archival materials.
As part of that process, Jones contacted Charles Sullivan, a professor of history and archivist at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, as well as author of the bookHurricanes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast(1986). Jones credits Sullivan as “almost a co-producer on this project” because of how much archival research he contributed, how much of a role he played in the documentary itself, and his many suggestions for people Jones should interview, which he did. As Jones said, “That’s kind of the key to one of these projects. You find one person who can be a champion for you and the project.” Sullivan, with such strong ties to the Gulf Coast and a love of history, was that person for this particular project.
Camille’s world premiere took place in three sold-out screenings at the Premiere LUX Cinema in Biloxi on August 16, 2019.Camillethen had its television premiere on Mississippi Public Broadcasting Television on August 28 and is now accessible online though the Southern Documentary Project. It is currently being distributed by the National Educational Television Association (NETA) and showing on several PBS stations nationwide.
Jones hopes his film can serve as a frank teacher and reminder of the past. Natural disasters are bound to repeat themselves—though our responses to them may not. “Learn from the past to prepare for the future,” Jones said, “because it’s a matter of notif, butwhenthe next storm comes.” His words may ring especially true for those living on the Gulf Coast, but even for those who reside more inland, the lesson is no less valuable. “The devastation of Hurricane Camille was one of the first big tests of resilience in the modern era for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and the lessons learned from this storm can inform us as we enter a period of climate change that causes more frequent, severe storms.”
Written By Katherine Aberle
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Announces Winners
This year the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) honored several artists, musicians, and writers with connections to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Ann Abadie, Jimmy Cajoleas, Will Jacks, and Susan Bauer Lee.
Abadie won the 2020 Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Since 1975, Ann Abadie has been a driving force at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, contributing to its success as the institution’s associate director, as the editor of numerous book projects, and as the co-founder of the Center’s annual Oxford Conference for the Book,” a statement on the MIAL website reads. “Now the Center’s associate director emerita, Abadie has spent the past five decades—and counting—working mostly behind the scenes on educational and literary projects across our state. A devoted ally to the arts and to the written word, she is most deserving of this award, and we are pleased to give her a night ‘in the spotlight’ for her tireless work.”
The filmIn the Spotlight(above),made by Center alumna Kate Medley and Jesse Paddock focuses on Abadie and her work with the Center and the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Abadie says she has admired the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters since 1978 when literature scholar and gifted author Noel Polk proposed that twenty-four prominent leaders throughout the state join him in founding an organization to recognize individuals for their contributions to the literary, musical, and visual arts.
Two years later, at its first annual meeting, MIAL presented three awards. Since then, the number and categories of awards have grown from three to eight, with occasional awards for special and lifetime achievements. MIAL has presented 254 awards to individuals and 10 for groups and special projects, like Mississippi Public Broadcasting, the University Press of Mississippi, and theMississippi Encyclopedia.
“Being a member of this marvelous organization has brought me infinite pleasure, and I am deeply touched and greatly honored to receive MIAL 2020 award named in honor of Noel Polk, my longtime friend, an internationally celebrated scholar and author, and one of Mississippi’s most significant leaders in arts and letters,” Abadie said.
In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award, there are eight categories, including Fiction, Nonfiction, Youth Literature, Visual Art, Music Composition (Classical), Music Composition (Contemporary), Photography, and Poetry.
Po’ Monkeys: Portrait of a Juke Jointby Will Jacks won the photography category.
Will Jacks
In a SouthTalks lecture at Barnard Observatory this spring, Jacks explained that his project was born out of a curiosity of a place he lived in: the Mississippi Delta. Jacks said he is humbled to be recognized for his photographs of Po’ Monkeys, particularly in light of the amazing work by the other nominees.
“I hope that folks will spend some time with their work as well, because there are lots of important ideas and images presented by these amazing artists,” said Jacks, program manager of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area. “I’ve always admired the work and the creatives honored by MIAL, and to now be a part of that group is a bit surreal. I don’t make work for recognition—I make it because of a need to just make—but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have the work acknowledged in this way. Our state has a long history of amazing creative talent, and MIAL helps preserve that. I’ll always be appreciative of this moment.”
Jimmy Cajoleas
Jimmy Cajoleas, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi, earned his BA in Southern Studies and his MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi. He was nominated in the Youth Literature category for his novelsMinor ProphetsandThe Rambling.
“This was my first time to be nominated, and it’s quite the honor,” said Cajoleas, who currently lives in New York.
In the Music Composition (Contemporary) category, Tim Lee and Susan Bauer Lee of the duo Bark won for theirTerminal Everything album.
Tim Lee said this album is a slight departure for them, and that the whole project was quite cathartic and satisfying.
“In addition to the fact that we’ve grown as a recording entity, which is pretty different for a duo versus a larger combo, the subject matter is more personal,” Tim said. “These ten songs were all written in the aftermath of the loss of Susan’s dad, my mom, some close friends, and longtime canine companions. We opted to take a fairly unflinching approach to documenting that time, and I like to think it comes through in the songs.”
Susan says “This World” and “Walk Small” are her two favorite songs.
“I remember when Tim brought ‘This World’ in and we started working on it. It made me cry,” she said. “And ‘Walk Small’, when we started playing that song live I always introduced it by saying that it’s about being humbled by someone you loved very much and losing them. Both songs are mostly about Tim’s mom.”
Susan, a graphic designer, created the cover art forTerminal Everything,and says she knew before the record was finished what she had in mind for the artwork. It turned out exactly how she wanted.
“I had never cut linoleum or made a print in my life, but the label that put out the record is also a letterpress and everyone was generous with helping me get started and shepherding me through the process,” she said. “The art basically symbolizes our worlds being blown apart and the two of us hanging on to each other. Our parents are represented in the art by two tiny marks . . . a red dot on Tim’s hand represents his mother, whose name was Dot, and a diamond shape on my hand, which references a ham radio logo. My dad was a ham radio guy for as long as I could remember. The printing was a hot, sweaty, physical, cathartic thing, and when it was done, we were very happy with the results.”
When they first saw the nomination list, Tim and Susan saw many names of friends and artists of whom they were fans.
Tim and Susan Lee, photo by Lost Art Photography
“When we found out we won, it was really a great feeling,” Tim said. “This is not a popularity contest, but an award based on the artistry of your work. We’re rock ’n’ roll folks, and I think it’s easy to overlook the art in that form. It’s very gratifying.
“It is a super cool honor and I was thrilled when we got the news.” Susan said.
The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ juried competition is one of a kind in the state, with carefully selected judges, chosen from out of state, who are prominent in their field. Supported by members, MIAL is privately funded, self-perpetuating, and non-profit.
Although the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters banquet has been cancelled as a result of the Covid-19 virus, there are plans to recognize the accomplishments of the award recipients. Among these plans is a joint celebration of the 2020 and 2021 winners in early June 2021, in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
To learn more about the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and other 2020 winners, visit https://www.ms-arts-letters.org/.
Written by Rebecca Lauck Cleary
Former Center Director Receives Fulbright Award
Ted Ownby plans to teach and conduct research at the University of Southern Denmark
Ted Ownby reads outside Barnard Observatory. Photo by Robert Jordan/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services
After Ted Ownby stepped down as the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in 2019, he wanted to do something different, so he decided to apply for a Fulbright Award. To his delight, he received word that he would be the Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies at theUniversity of Southern Denmark, which combines research and teaching and is the most prestigious Fulbright grant in Denmark.
“The Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark is a lively group with several scholars interested in the American South, and the university is an attractive place; I remember walking trails, bicycles, and lots of birds,” Ownby said. “The city of Odense is Denmark’s third-largest city, famous among other things as the home of Hans Christian Andersen, and I look forward to getting to know it. I’ll teach in English, but I’m slowly and awkwardly learning some Danish.”
Bicycles in Odense. Photo by Ted Ownby.
He will teach one class to either graduate or upper-level undergraduates with class sizes of approximately 25–45 students. He also will give at least one public lecture at the University of Southern Denmark, attend faculty meetings, talk to faculty and students, and be available to travel to other European universities.
Hans Christian Andersen was a writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, and he is best remembered for his fairy tales. Photo by Ted Ownby.
Katie McKee, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, has been a colleague of Ownby’s for many years. “This Fulbright is a tremendous opportunity for Dr. Ownby, a well-deserved chance for adventure after many years of serving as Center director and a real testament to the excellence of his scholarship,” McKee said.
The award was intended for the 2020–21 academic year, but the Covid-19 pandemic shortened the stay to the spring semester only, which begins in January 2021. Coincidentally, robotics researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have developed the world’sfirst fully automatic robot capable of carrying out throat swabs for Covid-19, so that healthcare professionals are not exposed to the risk of infection.
“I proposed two classes when I thought I would be there for two semesters, one on my current book project on ideas about innocence in twentieth-century Mississippi and the other a broader class on recent scholarship in southern history,” Ownby said. “Now the plan is either to teach the class about Mississippi, or maybe to team teach with a couple of colleagues in Denmark. Of course, it’s hard to plan right now, because it’s possible that health conditions won’t allow international travel.”
January should be an especially intriguing time to be teaching about the US because classes will begin just a few days after the US presidential inauguration.
St. Canute’s Cathedral in Odense. Photo by Ted Ownby.
“That election, no matter what I’m teaching about, will likely be a starting point for some good discussions,” Ownby said. “More broadly, teaching US history outside the US is always useful—I saw this teaching in the Fulbright program in Italy almost thirty years ago—because it makes faculty think about the questions we start with and encourages us to think about making comparisons we might not have considered.”
Colleagues in the history department are especially thrilled with Ownby’s award, said Noell Wilson, chair of history and Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies.
“It reveals the global profile of our faculty, even those who work primarily on US history and not necessarily on international topics,” Wilson said. “We are constantly looking to build intellectual bridges with colleagues in Europe and beyond, and are grateful to Ted for sharing his expertise with scholars and students in Denmark to establish collaborations in Scandinavia.”
Both the Danish and US governments financially support this program. The Fulbright US Scholar Program offers approximately some 470 teaching, research, or combination teaching/research awards in more than 125 countries. Opportunities are available for college and university faculty and administrators as well as for professionals, artists, journalists, scientists, lawyers, independent scholars, and many others. Besides several new program models designed to meet the changing needs of academics and professionals, Fulbright offers flexible awards, including multicountry opportunities.
Living Blues turns 50, the Book Conference is coming up in April, and an alumni profile on Odie Lindsey as the Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.
Study the South is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, online journal
Published, managed, and founded in 2014 by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Study the South exists to encourage interdisciplinary academic thought and discourse on the American South, particularly through the lenses of history, anthropology, sociology, music, literature, documentary studies, gender studies, religion, geography, media studies, race studies, ethnicity, folklife, and visual art.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia, a project that began at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 2003, was published in print in 2017 and made available online in 2018. The reference book was published by the University Press of Mississippi and later made available online, with support from the Mississippi Humanities Council.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia includes solid, clear information contained in a single volume/website, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else, with entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. It is the first encyclopedic treatment of the state since 1907.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia appeals to anyone who wants to know more about the state. It has proven to be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present.
The book won a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and awards of merit from the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Heritage Trust.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia is the successful result of numerous collaborations—between the University Press of Mississippi, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the Center for the Southern Culture, among the numerous supporters who contributed to or helped organize the project, among the thirty topic editors from around the state and far beyond it, and among the authors, an intriguing mixture of scholars. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History helped a great deal, and the University of Mississippi Department of History and School of Law joined the Southern Studies program in encouraging advanced students to write for the project. Early support came from the University of Mississippi and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Each entry in The Mississippi Encyclopedia provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. It also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, architecture, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, contemporary issues, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, gender, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, science and medicine, music, myths and representations, American Indians, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art.
The online version is updated regularly, and several entries are added each year.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia
A comprehensive guide to the people, places, and events that have shaped Mississippi.
Since the publication of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture in 1989, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture has shaped and defined the field of Southern Studies. With the 24-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Center continues to be a leader in the field of Southern scholarship.
The New Encyclopedia has been published as a series of clothbound and paperback volumes, making each individual section of the original edition a handy, one-volume guide for those who are interested in a particular subject, as well as making the volumes more accessible for classroom use. Several volumes, including Foodways, Language, Folk Art, and Ethnicity are composed of nearly all-new material. All of the articles first appearing in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have been updated or revised to reflect recent scholarship. The entire collection contains 24 volumes, and the final volumes were published in May 2013.
To purchase copies of the New Encyclopedia, contact UNC Press: 919-966-3561 | UNC Press online or purchase copies of the New Encyclopedia at your local independent bookstore.
Living Blues magazine, America’s first blues publication, was founded in Chicago in 1970 by Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel. From its inception, the magazine has aimed to document and preserve the African American blues tradition. Living Blues was acquired by the University of Mississippi in 1983 and is published bimonthly by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Living Blues shares the Center’s mission to promote scholarship and documentary work. Center graduate students frequently serve as interns and contributors for the magazine.
With in-depth features on blues icons like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King, as well as more obscure artists and rising stars, Living Blues has provided the best in blues journalism and photography for over forty years. Each issue of Living Blues features current Blues News, “Breaking Out” articles on up and coming artists, and the most extensive CD and DVD review section in the business. The Living Blues Radio Charts provide the music industry with the most accurate compilations of playlists from blues radio programmers throughout the world.
Additionally, since 2003, Living Blues has sponsored the Blues Today Symposium each spring on the University of Mississippi campus. The Symposium has featured such keynote speakers as Paul Oliver, Samuel Charters, and Bill Ferris as well as intimate musical performances by Honeyboy Edwards, Little Milton, and B.B. King.
(left to right) Mark Camarigg, publications manager of Living Blues magazine, Jim O'Neal, co-founder of Living Blues, Brett Bonner, Living Blues editor, and Scott Barretta, Highway 61 Radio host unveil the Blues Marker honoring Living Blues magazine which is published at The University of Mississippi.
In 2009, Living Blues was honored by the state of Mississippi with a Mississippi Blues Trail historical marker. Living Blues is also a past recipient of the Blues Foundation’s prestigious Keeping the Blues Alive Award.
The Center partners with several academic presses to publish scholarly books on the American South.
Volumes in the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Series include papers presented during the annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference held on the University of Mississippi campus since 1976.
Visit the University Press of Mississippi site to learn more about the series.
Gravy, a journal and podcast duo of original narratives that are fresh, unexpected, and thought-provoking. Each year, Gravy supports the work of over 100 writers, illustrators, and photographers. Please donate now to help SFA make more Gravy.
Center faculty publish across a number of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, musicology, literature, geography, foodways, and documentary studies. See their body of work below, organized by faculty member.
Latino Orlando portrays the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants who have come to the Orlando metropolitan area from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. While much research on immigration focuses on urban destinations, Simone Delerme delves into a middle- and upper-class suburban context, highlighting the profound demographic and cultural transformation of an overlooked immigrant hub.
Like the renowned classics Praying for Sheetrock and North Toward Home, Ever Is a Long Time captures the spirit and feel of a small Southern town divided by racism and violence in the midst of the Civil Rights era.
The South has produced some of America’s most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives—the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression.
The Book of Matthew cautions readers that "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." But for at least a century conservative American Protestants have been trying to prove that adage wrong. In The Blessings of Business, Darren E. Grem argues that while preachers, activists, and politicians have all helped spread the gospel, American evangelicalism owes its enduring strength in a large part to private enterprise.
An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.
The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these clichéd understandings.
Journeyman's Road offers a bold new vision of where the blues have been in the course of the twentieth century and what they have become at the dawn of the new millennium: a world music rippling with postmodern contradictions. Author Adam Gussow brings a unique perspective to this exploration. Not just an award-winning scholar and memoirist, he is an accomplished blues harmonica player, a Handy award nominee and veteran of the international club and festival circuit. With this unusual depth of experience, Gussow skillfully places blues literature in dialogue with the music that provokes it, vibrantly articulating a vital American tradition.
Mister Satan’s Apprentice is the history of one of music’s most fascinating collaborations, between Adam Gussow, a young graduate school dropout and harmonica player, and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a guitarist and underground blues legend who had originally made his name as “Five Fingers Magee.”
Seems Like Murder Here offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this provocative study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With brilliant interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Seems Like Murder Here will transform our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.
Mamie Smith’s pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?
In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition’s major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow’s thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.
Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century
Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies.
American Literature has been regarded since its inception as the preeminent periodical in its field. Each issue contains articles covering the works of several American authors—from colonial to contemporary.
The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U.S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an advanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U.S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage.
When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slave owners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.
Science and medicine have been critical to southern history and the formation of southern culture. For three centuries, scientists in the South have documented the lush natural world around them and set a lasting tradition of inquiry. The medical history of the region, however, has been at times tragic. Disease, death, and generations of poor health have been the legacy of slavery, the plantation economy, rural life, and poorly planned cities. The essays in this volume explore this legacy as well as recent developments in technology, research, and medicine in the South.
Thirty years of interviews with one of the most important modern American writers, who is often praised for his unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters
TheMississippi Storieswebsite, launched in July 2016, seeks to tell the complex story of Mississippi and Mississippians through multiple forms of documentary practice: film, photography, oral history, and sound. The website presents work by students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Center institutes and partnersLiving Bluesmagazine, the Southern Documentary Project, and the Southern Foodways Alliance.
The Center will post new stories periodically. Some of these will be finished and complete projects, and others will be snapshots of work in progress, or outtakes from larger projects. Some projects will explore topics outside the state of Mississippi, but all the documentarians learn and practice at the Center, based in Oxford.
The site will also make available archival documentary work created since the Center’s founding in 1977. This archival work will include publications constructed from documentary work, like magazinesRejoice!andOld Time Country.We hope that publishing materials from previous decades will encourage thoughtful discussions about how documentary work—how people do it and define it, how it uses scholarship, relates to scholarship, and is part of scholarship, and how best to share it with a public—may have changed over the years.
Recently, Wilkerson also received an honorable mention for the Philip Taft Labor History Prize for
Camille’s world premiere took place in three sold-out screenings at the Premiere LUX Cinema in Biloxi on August 16, 2019.
Susan, a graphic designer, created the cover art for Terminal Everything, and says she knew before the record was finished what she had in mind for the artwork. It turned out exactly how she wanted.
Living Blues magazine, America’s first blues publication, was founded in Chicago in 1970 by Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel. From its inception, the magazine has aimed to document and preserve the African American blues tradition. Living Blues was acquired by the University of Mississippi in 1983 and is published bimonthly by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Living Blues shares the Center’s mission to promote scholarship and documentary work. Center graduate students frequently serve as interns and contributors for the magazine.
