Announcing the 2025 Study the South Research Fellowship Scholars researching the South have an opportunity for funded research in the collections of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi. The Study the South Research Fellowship, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern …
The programming focus at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture for the 2022-23 academic year is “Race in the Classroom,” and the spring SouthTalks lectures follow that theme. Historically, classrooms have functioned as both intensely local spaces and as broader political stages on which debates about equality, identity and access have played out …
Study the South Publishes New Essay on the Economic South In this essay, “More Pricks Than Kicks: The Southern Economy in the Long Twentieth Century,” Peter A. Coclanis traces the evolution of the southern economy over the “long twentieth century,” which in his view began around 1865 and is not yet over. During this lengthy …
Scholars researching the South now have an opportunity for funded research in the collections of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi. The Study the South research fellowship, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of Archives and …
In the latest Study of the South essay, Sarah Payne looks at how recent representations of slavery have provoked discussions about who should represent black pain and oppression and what purpose such representations serve. The tour of Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014 in Wallace, Louisiana, stands out as the only plantation tour in the …
Gary Monroe was born and raised in South Beach, a neighborhood located on the tip of the island of Miami Beach, Florida. Between 1977 and 1986 Monroe made it his mission to photograph the aging—and disappearing—Jewish community there. “The lifestyle vanished like it had never happened,” he writes in the short essay that precedes this …
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is pleased to announce that Bobby J. Smith II is the first recipient of the Study the SouthResearch Fellowship. The award provides the opportunity for funded research in the collections of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi.
Call for Papers for STUDY THE SOUTH: “The American South in the 1970s” Study the South, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access, online journal published by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, seeks papers on the South in the 1970s. The journal hopes to publish several papers on the subject …
Scholars researching the history of the South now have an opportunity for funded research in the collections of the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi. The Study the South research fellowship, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of Archives and Special Collections, will provide funding of $1,500 to one qualified scholar, who will also have access to a carrel in the library.
The blues—as a palette of intense, often contradictory feelings; a range of social conditions heavily inflected by blackness and southernness; an expressive form encompassing literature as well as music; and a philosophical orientation towards experience—are a more complex cultural phenomenon than some realize. This essay unpacks the latter two concepts: blues expressiveness and the blues ethos. Blues expressiveness is constituted by a range of cultural practices, including the AAB stanza, call and response procedure, vocalizations, blues-idiomatic language, and signifying. The blues ethos, too, offers multiple strategies for surviving bad times by refusing to reify the down-ness of the present moment as an inescapable condition, sometimes with the help of harsh, redemptive laughter. In this essay, Adam Gussow draws on a range of lyric, literary, and folkloristic commentary by Langston Hughes, Cornell West, Bessie Smith, Howard Odum, Kalamu ya Salaam, W. C. Handy, Angela Y. Davis, Lonnie Johnson, and many others. The essay also takes an autobiographical turn as Gussow mines his own bandstand and classroom experience with Mississippi-born blues performers Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee and Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry to illustrate the blues ethos in action.