Dr. Jessica Wilkerson, who just completed her first year as Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies, has just won an award from the Labor and Working Class History Association for her dissertation, “Where Movements Meet: From the War on Poverty to Grassroots Feminism in the Appalachian South.”
We’ve discussed Dr. Jodi Skipper’s work on the Behind the Big House project on the blog before. Here, news of a much-deserved honor for Dr. Skipper. This article, by Center intern Emily Beene, appears in the Spring 2015 issue of the Southern Register. Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies Honored with Award of Merit …
As B. B. King is laid to rest Saturday in Indianola, we wanted to share footage from the 2004 Blues Today Symposium when the Center named King an Honorary Professor of Southern Studies. Charles Reagan Wilson, then Director of the Center, conveys the honor. Greg Johnson of the Blues Archive did a public interview with …
Mary Hartwell Howorth retires this week after 23 years working at the Center. She has been important to the Center’s work in countless ways, and Barnard Observatory won’t be the same without her. The many students, faculty, and staff she has befriended over the years will miss her greatly.
Mark Camarigg, Managing Editor of Center publication Living Blues magazine, is co-editor with Mike Rowe and Bill Greensmith of a forthcoming book of interviews from the magazine Blues Unlimited. The book will be published in September.
The Toughest Job: William Winter’s Mississippi, a documentary film by Matthew Graves and the Southern Documentary Project (SouthDocs), has been nominated for an Emmy for best historical documentary by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).
The Center and our institute the Southern Documentary Project just began working with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on a short film about the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was signed 50 years ago on August 6, 1965.
Beginning Friday, May 1, Southern Studies graduate student Lauren Holt exhibits photographs from the Bern and Franke Keating Collection in Barnard Observatory’s Gammill Gallery. The photos on display were made at the grand opening of the Habana Hilton hotel in Havana, Cuba, in late March 1958.
We’ve just published a new essay on our journal Study the South. Karlos K. Hill’s essay, published May 11, explores the near lynching of Robert Johnson’s stepfather, Charles Dodds, the influence that event may have had on Johnson and his music, the horrors of spectacle lynching in the late 19th and early 20th century South, and grassroots responses to this violence.
Each year the Center gives several awards for papers and documentary projects, and the announcement is made at the Southern Studies Graduation celebration. Here are the winners for 2015. The Gray and Coterie Awards FOR the Best undergraduate papers in Southern Studies classes Gray Award, Emelda Lee Miller, “Makin’ Whoopee with the Devil, A Brief …