New on Mississippi Stories, a lecture by Assistant Professor of Sociology and Southern Studies Dr. Brian Foster: “‘That’s for the White Folks’: Race, Culture, and (Un)Making Place in the Rural South.” Dr. Foster presented the lecture, based on his ethnographic work in rural Mississippi, on October 25, 2017 as part of the Center’s Brown Bag Lecture Series.
New on Mississippi Stories, films created by Southern Studies graduate students Victoria De Leone and Rebecca Lauck Cleary as part of SST 598: Documenting Southern Foodways Class in spring 2017. Southern Foodways Alliance Pihakis Film Fellow Ava Lowrey taught the course.
Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies Jessie Wilkerson received an award at the recent meeting of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Organized in 1970, the organization meets annually and has over 700 members. The SAWH strives to stimulate interest in the study of Southern and women’s history as well to advance the status of women historians.
Southern Documentary Project Producer / Director John Rash has just returned from a week of cultural exchanges and discussions as an invited presenter and teacher at Photo Beijing, the largest annual celebration of international photography in Beijing, China.
Living Blues #251 (October/November 2017) features bass player Benny Turner on the cover. Turner is the brother of Freddie King and has spent a lifetime backing some of the best in the blues.
The Southern Documentary Project, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, has a new documentary film titled Flag Flap Over Mississippi by director Rex Jones that explores tensions around the divisive Mississippi state flag. There will be a premiere screening and discussion of the film at 6pm on Wednesday, October 25 at the Overby Center for Journalism and Politics on the UM campus. A discussion of the film will follow, with UM professor Ralph Eubanks moderating a discussion with Starke Miller and Carlos Moore, who appear in the film. The screening and discussion are free and open to the public.
The August/September #250 issue of Living Blues celebrates the blues of Clarksdale, Mississippi and the 30th anniversary of the Sunflower River Blues & Gospel Festival.
This interview by Scott Barretta originally appeared in the Fall 2017 Southern Register.
Adam Gussow is an associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi whose latest book is Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil in the Blues Tradition (University Press of North Carolina), a survey that occupied seven years of research. Gussow has also grappled extensively with the devil in his parallel career as a professional blues musician—for over thirty years he’s recorded and toured internationally with Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a relationship he addressed in his memoir Mr. Satan’s Apprentice.
Photographs from the Do Good Fund’s photo collection will be exhibited at various venues in Mississippi during the fall of 2017. Those venues include the Gammill Gallery (Southern People, Southern Places) from late September through mid-December, the UM Art Department’s Gallery 130 (NOW: Contemporary Southern Photography) during October, as well as at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gallery of Art and Design (Portraits of Southerners) October 12–December 12. There are smaller exhibits scheduled in several Water Valley venues and possibly one in Sumner.
While fresh flowers or a night out to dinner might be a perfectly acceptable birthday present, Ernest Joyner III of Tupelo, Mississippi, went one step further. His recent birthday surprise to his wife, Jamie, was the creation of the Jamie Joyner Endowment in Southern Studies to assist University of Mississippi graduate students.