Dr. D’Andra Orey of Jackson State University gave a Brown Bag talk on Wednesday, April 12 as part of the Center’s Radical South Brown Bag Series, presented in partnership with the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Documentarian Chris Colbeck interviewed him about his research, and you can watch the interview here.
Up today, an academic article by new Southern Studies faculty member Brian Foster. His article “Everybody Gotta Have a Dream”: Rap-centered Aspirations among Young Black Males Involved in Rap Music Production – A Qualitative Study” was published in 2014 in Issues in Race and Ethnicity: An Interdisciplinary Global Journal.
Symposium Speaker Karl Hagstrom Miller on Research Inspiration, Segregating Sound, and Multidisciplinarity Southern Studies graduate student Chris Colbeck interviewed Music of the South Symposium speaker Karl Hagstrom Miller on April 6, 2016. Chris, whose own thesis project is on music, interviewed Miller as part of a series of Southern Documentary Project interviews with Center speakers. …
Clothing and Fashion in Southern History February 22 – 23, 2016 The Center will host a symposium on Clothing and Fashion in Southern History on February 22 – 23. The symposium will convene scholars from the fields of history and cultural studies who will contribute essays to a forthcoming book on the subject. The scholars …
Dr. Jodi Skipper and Dr. David Wharton have been documenting and studying black Mardi Gras celebrations in Lafayette, Louisiana for several years. Their research was just published in the Summer 2015 issue of The Southern Quarterly, a publication of the University of Southern Mississippi.
While a Master of Arts degree can be the pinnacle of schoolwork for some students, others continue their foray through academia. Here are a few of the Southern Studies alums who, having decided to pursue a PhD in various fields, are working on or have nearly completed their dissertations. The MA program is known for producing graduates with diverse interests, and these topics reflect that diversity.
Two Southern Studies assistant professors are getting to use their passports this summer as recipients of the Provost’s Faculty Development Award for Campus Internationalization. Catarina Passidomo heads to Peru May 31–June 10 for “Peruvian Food Systems: Balancing Growth and Preservation,” and Jodi Skipper goes to Senegal June 7–17 for “Islam, Politics, and Culture in Senegal and West Africa.”
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.
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.
Southern Studies 601 is a required course for all SST MA students, and most take it during their first semester. This fall, Dr. Katie McKee taught the course. In addition to reading a book a week (including Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness, Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and Zandria Robinson’s This …