Despite 2020’s best efforts to derail us, we have had a positive and productive year at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
We have carried out our work in different ways than we expected to do it: we have taught remotely, shared our programming remotely, and worked remotely. But in surprising and delightful ways, we have drawn closer to wider audiences. More of you have been able to join us for lectures and events. Students who might otherwise have had to delay their education were able to begin it. And in navigating new challenges every day, we have become at the Center better apprised of our individual strengths. We would like to share some of our accomplishments with you.
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Southern Studies in the Classroom
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Academic work remains the focus of the Center. Despite the many hurdles introduced by the pandemic, four undergraduate majors in Southern Studies and ten graduate students earned their degrees in the spring or summer of 2020, five MA students and five MFA students. You can read more about their projects here.
We welcomed 11 new MA students and three new MFA students this fall.
In the fall of 2019, our new undergraduate curriculum began and included the following 100-level courses: “Introduction to the South and Food,” “The South and Race,” “Music and Southern Society,” “Southern Mythologies and Popular Culture,” “Introduction to Southern Documentary,” and “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in the South.” Southern Studies is now listed as a program on the Academic Common Market, meaning that students from other SEC schools without a Southern Studies program can come to study with us at reduced tuition rates.
Center activities have become even more woven into the classroom. Professors have designed opportunities for their students to publish in the online version of the Mississippi Encyclopedia; classes use films and podcasts from the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Southern Documentary Project.
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Faculty continue to publish scholarship that leads the field in discussions about region, nation, and interdisciplinarity. This year, Southern Studies faculty have published or have forthcoming six books.
- Simone Delerme, Latino Orlando: Suburban Transformation and Racial Conflict
- W. Ralph Eubanks, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Landscape
- B. Brian Foster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place and the Backbeat of Black Life
- Adam Gussow, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music
- Ted Ownby and Becca Walton, eds., Clothing and Fashion in Southern History
- David Wharton, Scenes from Southern Roadsides
In addition, B. Brian Foster will become co-editor in 2021 of the acclaimed journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
Faculty also won awards for their scholarly achievement and their dedication to the classroom.
- B. Brian Foster has been named the 2020-21 University of Mississippi-Mississippi Humanities Council Humanities Teacher of the Year.
- Ted Ownby was awarded a Fulbright to teach at the University of Southern Denmark.
- Catarina Passidomo won the Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Instruction of First-Year Students.
- Jodi Skipper won the Diversity Innovator Award and served as a keynote speaker at the Southern Studies Conference in Montgomery, AL.
- Jessica Wilkerson won a Mike L. Edmonds New Scholar Award from the College of Liberal Arts.
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Southern Studies in the Public Eye
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The Center’s SouthTalks lecture series, organized and executed by Associate Director Afton Thomas, clustered programming around two themes this year: “Movement and Migration in, to, and through the U.S. South” and “Voting Rights and Community Activism.” We hosted 13 virtual events this fall, ranging from panel discussions to films, featuring the first annual “Future of the South” lecture by Jelani Cobb, as well as a roundtable with several contributors to the volume Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections, including Carol Anderson, Jim Downs, and Kevin M. Kruse. You still can access some of these events on our YouTube channel.
Under the editorship of Associate Director James G. Thomas, Jr., the Center published new entries to the online Mississippi Encyclopedia and in its online journal Study the South, which posted articles about race and health, the theater and Civil Rights, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the southern economy. Connect to all of our publications here.
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Gravy, the publication and podcast of the Southern Foodways Alliance, was again nominated for and won multiple awards, and the SFA launched its SFA Stories app. In October, the SFA commissioned 13 films for the first virtual fall symposium, which explored the “Future of the South” and hosted over 400 attendees. Read about it and other initiatives from the SFA, here.
Southern Studies faculty, staff, and students have worked this year to collect oral histories in a variety of settings.
- Photographs by Andrea Morales appeared regularly in nationally circulating news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She continues to contribute to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a grassroots journalism project based in Memphis and focused on poverty, power, and public policy.
- Camille: The Original Monster Storm, a film by Rex Jones, continued its year-long public television run on select PBS stations nationwide, and Jones produced several segments of Mississippi Roads for Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
- Producer/director John Rash delivered lectures and screenings of his work in China and in the U.S. and received the Best Independent Music Documentary Prize from the International Independent Music Video Awards for his film about the group Negro Terror.
Living Blues Magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary this year with a series of special issues, including one dedicated to looking back at 21 past cover artists, another focusing on today's Mississippi Delta Blues scene, and finally one devoted to the Next Generation of the Blues.
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Southern Studies in Partnership, On and Off-Campus
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We engaged our UM campus community in a series of projects this year.
Over the summer, we held workshops for new recruits to the Mississippi Teacher Corps, administered by the UM School of Education.
Southern Studies faculty and staff serve on the Provost’s appointed Black Power at Ole Miss Task Force and are members of the UM Slavery Research Group.
We partnered with the Sarah Isom Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the School of Journalism and New Media to host civil rights activist Mandy Carter and to sponsor February’s “Women and Political Engagement” summit.
We are particularly honored to house the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement’s first William Winter Fellow Rhondalyn Peairs.
Work with off-campus communities is equally important to us and often overlaps with the work of our on-campus partners.
- In her role as Winter Fellow, Peairs works along with Dr. Jodi Skipper on several initiatives in Holly Springs, Mississippi, including the Behind the Big House program and a new historical research project about Holly Springs native Ida B. Wells.
- Beginning this fall, we are partnering with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, MS; graduate student Christina Huff is assisting in content development for an app about the area.
- Even farther south, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art invited our partnership in planning their “Southern Art/Wider World” series of virtual conversations, and a number of Center faculty have appeared in the programming, along with films by recent Center MFA graduate Zaire Love.
- Partnerships with the University of Georgia Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and the University Press of Mississippi will bring a steady stream of scholars, artists and writers to our campus in the coming months and years.
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But really - we’re just getting started! After supporting successful and ongoing Future of the South initiatives connected first to migration and next to LGBTQ southerners, we turn in the spring of 2021 to “Flood Gates,” a look at climate change in Mississippi and throughout the South. In the fall, we will explore “Mississippi Voices” across time periods, settings, and disciplines.
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Your contribution helps us shape the Future of the South.
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