New MISSISSIPPI STORY on the Jewish Community of Natchez

There has been a Jewish community in Natchez, Mississippi for 175 years—and Robin Amer’s family has been part of it for 160 of them. But now the number of Jews in Natchez has dwindled to only a handful. In this audio story, Robin returns to learn what culinary culture might disappear when they’re gone.

Spring 2017 Brown Bags Announced!

The Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series takes place on select days at noon in the Barnard Observatory lecture hall during the regular academic year. Please join us!

New MISSISSIPPI STORY by SST Alum Mary Blessey

We’ve just published a new MISSISSIPPI STORY on our documentary media website, mississippistories.org. In 2015, Southern Studies graduate student Mary Blessey taught a digital photography class to children ages 9-12 enrolled in the summer program at Tutwiler Community Education Center in Tutwiler, Mississippi.

Sarah Dixon Pegues, the “Heart of the Center,” Retires

After being a constant in Barnard Observatory for thirty-five years, Sarah Dixon Pegues will retire from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. As the Center’s administrative assistant since 1980, she handles all financial matters, including budgets, payroll, travel requests, procurement, and purchasing, as well as processing grant applications and helping with reports for externally funded projects.

New STUDY THE SOUTH Article on Geography and Myth in Faulkner

The best-known setting for William Faulkner’s work is of course the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, set in the hills of North Mississippi, but Faulkner also spent time in the Mississippi Delta, both in person and on paper. In various ways, Delta natives and those with close ties to the alluvial region—such as Ben Wasson, William Alexander Percy, and Phil Stone—significantly affected Faulkner’s life and career. As a result, the Mississippi Delta’s impression on Faulkner influenced much of his fiction in the 1930s and ’40s. The Delta crops up in novels such as The Wild Palms, Go Down, Moses, and Absalom, Absalom! and in stories such as “The Bear,” “Red Leaves,” “A Justice,” and “A Courtship.” Unfurled, these novels and stories present a Faulknerian history of the Delta, and in “The Delta and Yoknapatawpha: The Layering of Geography and Myth in the Works of William Faulkner,” Phillip Gordon bridges the narrow divide between these two Mississippi regions that were so significant to the work of Mississippi’s most celebrated author.

The Center Announces a CFP on The Radical South: Southern Activism, Past and Present

The Center for the Study of Southern Culture announces a $1,000 research grant to advance scholarship on The Radical South: Southern Activism, Past and Present. The Center will also provide travel expenses for the selected scholar-in-residence to visit the University of Mississippi campus and present her or his work in a lecture during a month-long series of events in April 2017. The scholar-in-residence’s work will be subsequently published in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s online journal, Study the South.

BROTHERS: A New Film by Rex Jones on MISSISSIPPI STORIES

We’ve just published a new story as part of the Center’s documentary website Mississippi Stories. In this short film, Rex Jones of the Southern Documentary Project visits barbershops in Greenwood and Greenville to profile a new public health program in Mississippi.

Grad Student Guest Post: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do

Graduate school comes to us all in different ways: you might read a book that piques your interest, you might have a passion for a particular cuisine, you might have a career goal that requires a higher degree. Or you could be like me, and apply to graduate school because you’re just not sure what’s coming next. Two years ago I was finishing up a student teaching internship that just wasn’t fitting and I found myself wondering what on earth would come next, often out loud and often to my dog.