Online Version of THE MISSISSIPPI ENCYCLOPEDIA is live

As of this summer, if you don’t want to lug around the nine-pound Mississippi Encyclopedia, just grab your laptop and the wonders of the state are at your fingertips. Soon there will be an online version of the 1,451-page Mississippi Encyclopedia, a project that began at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 2003 and concluded with publication in 2017.

Center Director Named William Winter Professor of History

Ted Ownby, Center Director

As director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Ted Ownby fulfills many roles. He recently added one more to the list as the university’s William F. Winter Professor of History.

In 1992, the University of Mississippi Foundation established an endowment fund to promote and recognize excellence in historical scholarship and to honor former Gov. William F. Winter, a staunch supporter of public education.

New Film by John Rash Profiles NC Bookmobile Owner

John Rash of the Southern Documentary Project has a new short film called Nomad Chapter, which profiles Diarra Leggett, owner of Boomerang Bookshop: Nomad Chapter, a North Carolina-based bookmobile. View it on the Center’s documentary media site Mississippi Stories, whose Mississippi-based storytellers tell the stories of people and communities around the globe.

April/May LIVING BLUES Available Now

Living Blues #254 (April/May 2018) features the duo of Warner Williams and Jay Summerour on the cover. One of the last great East Coast blues duos, Williams (age 87) and Summerour do it the old-school way.

Southern Studies MA Students to Present Projects on May 1

Southern Studies MA Students to Present Projects on May 1 On Tuesday, May 1 at 7pm, the Center will host Documentary Thesis Presentations for Southern Studies M.A. students Rachel Childs, Rebecca Lauck Cleary, and Victoria De Leone. The event will be at the Burns-Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center, 710 Jackson Avenue East in Oxford.  

Creative Writing Contest Open to High School Writers

Do you think you might be the next Richard Wright? Or can channel your inner O’Connor with a flick of a pen? If so, you should enter your stories and poems for consideration in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s annual Eudora Welty Awards. Students must be Mississippi residents. The competition is open to

Queer Mississippi: Oral History Performance Explores LGBTQ History

Students in Dr. Jessie Wilkerson’s Southern Studies 506 Graduate Seminar in Southern LGBTQ History and Oral History Methods will present an oral history performance Wednesday, April 25 at 7pm at Burns-Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center. The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow the performance.

MISSISSIPPI ENCYCLOPEDIA and POTLIKKER PAPERS Recognized by MIAL

The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters has awarded Center publication The Mississippi Encyclopedia its 2018 Special Achievement Award, and John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has received the MIAL Nonfiction award for his book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South.

Gallery Exhibit Documents the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike

On Tuesday, April 10 at 5:30 pm in Barnard Observatory, journalist Emily Yellin and photographer Darius B. Williams will give a public talk on Striking Voices, their multimedia journalism project based on in-depth, video interviews with Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike in 1968, and their wives and children. Martin Luther King was in town standing up for their cause when he was killed in Memphis 50 years ago.