South Talks
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted, and is free and open to the public.
To watch SouthTalks from the past, visit our YouTube channel.
After Sherman
Jon-Sesrie Goff
Returning to the coastal South Carolina land that his family purchased after Emancipation, filmmaker Jon-Sesrie Goff desired to explore his Gullah/Geechee roots, a journey that transformed into a poetic investigation of Black inheritance, trauma, and generational wisdom amid the violent tensions that define America’s collective history.
Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. His work, including his documentary film After Sherman, includes extensive research, visual documentation, and oral history interviews in the coastal American South on the legacy of Black landownership and Gullah/Geechee heritage preservation.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public. Visit southernstudies.olemiss.edu for more information about all Center events.
“Good Night, New Deal: The Waltons and the South’s Great Depression in American Memory”
Darren E. Grem
The Waltons, a popular television show airing from 1972 to 1981, re-remembered and re-framed for millions what the Great Depression and New Deal meant, using Virginia writer Earl Hamner Jr.’s personal remembrances and novels to present southern whites as exemplars of family ties, communal bonds, and self-reliant work. Tapping into a growing conservative outlook in American life and politics, The Waltons joined—and conflicted with—other southern memory myths that erased or enhanced the New Deal and federal state’s role in the Depression-era and modern South. This talk will consider what The Waltons’s regional, racial, and rural storylines offered Americans reeling during the recessionary 1970s. More broadly, it will use The Waltons as a springboard for considering the memories and myths we allow to be aired when capitalism falters or fails, whether derived from the distant hard times of the 1930s or 1970s or the recent hard times of the Great Recession and Covid-crash.
Darren E. Grem is an associate professor of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity, and his next book, Hard Times, USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory, explores how Americans after World War II remembered and used the Great Depression via popular culture and in political activism for and against the New Deal state.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit southernstudies.olemiss.edu for more information about all Center events.
Deep Inside the Blue
Margo Cooper, Joe Ayers, and Trent Ayers
In this SouthTalk, photographer and author will be joined in conversation by blues musicians Joe Ayers and his son Trent Ayers. Cooper had the privilege of interviewing both Ayers men for her book Deep Inside the Blues. She describes Joe Ayers as kind, wise, and passionate about playing guitar. Trent Ayers grew up listening to a variety of blues music with his father—tapes of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Muddy Waters, R. L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough, and Trent and his father recently worked on an album together called A Father Son Legacy. Joe and Trent Ayers will play music during this SouthTalk.
Margo Cooper’s recently published book, Deep Inside the Blues, collects thirty-four of her interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with more than 160 of her photographs. Many of the key blues players of the period have already passed, making their stories and Cooper’s photographs of them all the more poignant and valuable.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit southernstudies.olemiss.edu for more information about all Center events.
“Cold War Country: Music Row, the Pentagon, and the Sound of American Patriotism”
Joseph M. Thompson
Country music maintains a unique, decades-long relationship to the US military, but these ties didn’t just happen. Joseph M. Thompson explores how country music’s Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling country music to US servicemembers and international audiences. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on country music artists to support recruitment programs. Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country while fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism.
Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. His first book, Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism, analyzes the economic and symbolic connections between the country music business and the military-industrial complex since World War II.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit southernstudies.olemiss.edu for more information about all Center events.
Phillip “Pip” Gordon, UM visiting assistant professor of gender studies in the Sarah Isom Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, discusses “Faulkner’s Enduring Queerness” at noon May 1. Gordon discusses Faulkner’s relevance to broadening fields of trans and ace studies and the value such approaches have to our understanding of Faulkner and the South.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. Visit southernstudies.olemiss.edu for more information about all Center events.
Gammill Gallery and Tupelo Room
Barnard Observatory
Spring Documentary Showcase
The Spring Documentary Showcase is a celebration of the work by our documentary students. Each artist will present their work. Attendees will have an opportunity to engage with the artists and their work during a reception.