Events Calendar

In early 1960 Black students across the nation launched nonviolent direct-action campaigns in more than seventy cities across the nation, challenging Jim Crow segregation and violence. These students took courageous action knowing they would face arrest, expulsion, or even lose their lives. So why did they do it? Anthony Siracusa argues that the political philosophy of religious nonviolence was a key motivation for many. Siracusa excavates the history of this idea in his forthcoming book, Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle, and explains how what he calls a “politics of being” came to occupy a central place in the Black freedom struggle.

A historian of modern America and a civic engagement professional in higher education, Anthony Siracusa works at the intersection of the community and the academy. He has written extensively about nonviolence and the Black freedom movement, and his first book, Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle, will be released by UNC Press in June 2021. He teaches a variety of courses on African American history, religion, and politics in addition to community-based learning courses. He also develops and administers projects and programs in partnership with communities beyond the campus to enhance student learning and strengthen community impacts. Siracusa is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

In this talk, Edward L. Ayers narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the set­tling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern his­tory and including Indigenous, white, Black, and immigrant people in the story, Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that subdivide southern history.

Ayers explains the major contours and events of the southern past from a fresh perspective, weav­ing geography with history in innovative ways. He uses unique color maps created with sophisticated tools to in­terpret massive data sets from a humanistic per­spective, providing a view of movement within the South with a clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. The South has never stood still; it is—and always has been—changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory ways, often in divergent directions. Ayers will be in conversation with Ted Ownby, professor of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.

Edward L. Ayers has been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, won the Bancroft, Beveridge, and Lincolns Prizes in American history, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and worked as the founding chair of the board of the American Civil War Museum. He is executive director of New American, dedicated to sharing innovative work in words, maps, audio, and video with broad audiences and the nation’s schools. He is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond, as well as a former dean of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia.

Ted Ownby is William F. Winter Professor of History and Southern Studies, coeditor of The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and author of Hurtin’ Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South and other works.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

Chuck Ross’s “Protests in Pro Football, 1965–2020” talk examines both the events leading up to the 1965 American Football League All-Star game protest and the events that led to Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 NFL protest. Ross will also discuss the legacy of Kaepernick’s actions in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the different responses by professional sports leagues and teams in America.

Chuck Ross is a native of Columbus, Ohio, and currently is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Mississippi. He holds a B.A. in history from Stillman College. He has an M.A. in Black studies, an M.A. in history, and a Ph.D. in history, each from The Ohio State University. He is the author of, Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football, which was published by Temple University Press in 2016, and Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League, which was released by New York University Press in 1999. His teaching interests include twentieth-century US history, African American history, and sports history. He has appeared on ESPN’s Outside the Lines and on ESPN Radio.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

Frank X Walker will read from and discuss his latest collection of poems, Masked Man, Black: Pandemic and Protest Poems. The poems document in real time the myriad of challenges presented by the multiple pandemics of Covid-19 and racial injustice. They also offer edifying pockets of solace as the poet shares his family’s survival tips, strategies, and discoveries in midst of so much loss, while properly laying blame at the feet of the administration that unnecessarily politicized, misled, and further complicated this country’s response to the virus. University of Mississippi associate professor of English and African American studies Derrick Harriell will facilitate the Q&A portion of this event.

Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. He has published eleven collections of poetry, including Masked Man, Black: Pandemic and Protest Poems and Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the South, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and cofounded the Affrilachian Poets. He is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture and serves as professor of English and African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Derrick Harriell is the Otillie Schillig Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. His poem collections are Cotton (2010), Ropes (2013, winner of the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry), and Stripper in Wonderland (2017). His poems, stories, and essays have been published widely.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

Daphne Chamberlain’s talk highlights the role of children as leaders and participants in the Mississippi civil rights movement between 1946 and 1965. This presentation also offers a new perspective on the origins of the civil rights struggle and gives credence to how instrumental young people were to engaging in radical protest and grassroots activism in Mississippi.

Chamberlain completed her undergraduate studies at Tougaloo College in 2001 and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Mississippi. Before returning to Tougaloo as a faculty member, Chamberlain was the founding director of the COFO Civil Rights Education Center at Jackson State University. In 2013 Chamberlain returned to Tougaloo College, where she is an associate professor of history and the associate provost and vice president for academic affairs.

This event is sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

American children are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial violence, and for some, an increased awareness of inequality. Based on two years of ethnographic research with affluent white kids and their families, Margaret A. Hagerman’s talk examines how white kids learn about race, racism, inequality, and privilege in the contexts of their everyday lives. This talk explores how white racial socialization is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves.

Margaret A. Hagerman is an associate professor of sociology at Mississippi State University and is a faculty affiliate in the African American studies and gender studies programs there. She is the author of White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America (2019), and she is a nationally recognized expert on white racial socialization. Her research can be found in publications such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. She has visited a number of schools and communities across the country to share her work with parents, teachers, neighborhood associations, school administrators, and young people.

This event is sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

The Original Peoples of the Southeast differed culturally, politically, and linguistically from other tribes across North America. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Nations were forcibly removed from their traditional homelands and relocated to Oklahoma. In her talk, Dwanna L. McKay will examine some of the unique cultural practices and diverse histories of Indigenous Nations originally of the southeastern woodlands from precontact to current day.

Dwanna L. McKay is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and an assistant professor in the race, ethnicity, and migration studies program at Colorado College. McKay holds a PhD in sociology, a graduate certificate in Indigenous studies, an MS in sociology, an MBA in management science, and a BA in political science. Raised culturally within the boundaries of her tribal nation in Oklahoma, McKay centers her teaching, research, service, and activism on an overall commitment to social justice. Her research focuses on social inequality and Indigenous identity, and has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Sociological Compass, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, American Indian Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and the European Sociological Review. She has also authored multiple book chapters, poems, essays, and opinion editorials. McKay currently serves on the national advisory committee for the Native American Student Advocacy Institute and previously held an appointment as Secretary of Education for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

Arts in Barnard Lecture: “Traditional Crafts of Coastal Louisiana”  with Maida Owens and Janie Luster

In the talk “Traditional Crafts of Coastal Louisiana,” Louisiana state folklorist Maida Owens will talk about the crafts made by the many traditional cultures found on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Some are made from native plants, such as the Spanish moss crafts, decoy carving, and boatbuilding, while others, such as embroidery and cloth dolls, are crafted from traditional textiles. All of these cultures are endangered as a result of increasing population movements due to land loss. Houma Indian Janie Luster will talk about her family traditions of using garfish scales and palmetto basketry. She studied museum artifacts to revive the half-hitch weave.

Maida Owens has been with the Louisiana Division of the Arts since 1986 and manages the state’s folklife program, where she has worked with hundreds of traditional artists and their communities and curates the program’s Folklife in Louisiana website. The program’s current project is the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which helps to sustain the cultures of coastal Louisiana.

Janie Luster is a master palmetto basket weaver and cultural preservationist of the United Houma Nation. Hailing from the community of Bayou DuLarge in Terrebone Parish, Luster comes from a long line of traditional healers and is a tribal advocate.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

In the last six years, B. Brian Foster has talked with hundreds of Black Mississippians about race, the blues, politics, memory, community, and more. In this talk, he shares with us some of what they’ve shared with him, and he considers what it all might mean both now and for the future. Some of that work is included in his new book, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life, in which he considers the value of non-affirming sensibilities like pessimism, frustration, and exhaustion for how we think about Black identity and lived experience.

Brian Foster is a writer and storyteller from Mississippi. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently works as assistant professor of sociology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Foster also serves as coeditor of the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and is director of the Mississippi Hill Country Oral History Collective.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

Founder and editor-in-chief Lyndsey Gilpin says “the south, particularly its poor and rural people, stands to bear the brunt and lose the most from the effects of climate change, and these folks need to be the ones leading the way on addressing economic, environmental, and racial injustice.” During this talk, Gilpin will discuss how Southerly came to exist and their mission to collaborate with local news outlets and other organizations to bring more accurate and thoughtful storytelling about ecology, justice, and culture to this region — especially to rural, low-income, and BIPOC communities.

Lyndsey Gilpin was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and now based in Durham, N.C., she is a reporter and editor who has covered climate change, energy, environmental justice all over the U.S. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Daily Beast, CityLab, High Country News, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Grist, Outside, Inside Climate News, and more. She earned her master’s degree from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Black students have struggled to reimagine the university. That struggle is one still worth fighting for. In the 1980s, when the rightward momentum shook the world to its core, Black student movements offered an alternative vision. Joshua M. Myers’s presentation will look to Howard students during that era as a model for what we still might do with the university.

Myers’s book, We Are Worth Fighting For, is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s administration building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip-hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent Black Nationalist ethos.

At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. (Freedom Organization for Racial and Cultural Enlightenment). Cofounded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how Black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.

Joshua M. Myers is an associate professor of Africana studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989 (2019) and the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the current health crisis, all events will be virtual, free, and accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the webinar link.

The Spring Documentary Showcase is a celebration of the work by our documentary students. Each artist will present their work followed by a Q&A session with questions from the audience.

featuring Shardé Thomas, Scott Barretta, and LMR Live host Nancy Maria Balach

Join Living Music Resource for a lively discussion and interactive experience with artists featured in the upcoming September 14 “Voices of Mississippi” concert — demonstrating the range of talent and people who make up our state, including Scott Barretta and Shardé Thomas. Visit livingmusicresource.com at 1 p.m.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the ongoing health crisis, many events will be virtual, free, and made accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the event link.

Okla Humma: I Maya Moma Hoki (The Honorable People: We Have Remained in This Place) by Tammy Greer 

As a member of the United Houma Nation and director of the Center for American Indian Research and Studies (CAIRS) at the University of Southern Mississippi, Tammy Greer has worked with Southeastern Native tribal members on numerous projects, including the formation of CAIRS and the building of a one thousand-square-foot Medicine Wheel garden on the USM campus. She is the faculty advisor for the Golden Eagles Intertribal Society, a Native focused student group on campus who, along with CAIRS, tends the garden, hosts a yearly powwow, and organizes two Native Ways School Day events each year. Greer is currently working with the Mississippi INBRE Telenutrition Center to recruit Native students from Mississippi and Louisiana to engage in a summer program in health disparities research. The focus of her Okla Achukma project is to address preventable chronic diseases in our Southeastern Native tribes in a more holistic way using the traditional teachings of the sacred Medicine Wheel. In this SouthTalk, Greer will discuss how Medicine Wheel teachings can lead us to a more inclusive, more holistic way of being with one another and with all beings on earth.

“The Price of the Ticket: Paying for Diversity and Inclusion”  by Deborah Gray White

Many colleges and universities have added “diversity and inclusion” to their mission statements in recent years, but these goals have financial and emotional costs and are not achieved without intentional and thoughtful effort to dismantle the structures that perpetuate exclusion and homogeneity. Rutgers University began this process in 2015 by delving into its history and exploring how and why the structures that excluded African Americans for more than 200 years were created. For this year’s Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History, Rutgers history professor Deborah Gray White will talk about that history and the price Rutgers paid, and is paying, to make the diversity that it advertises a reality.

The title of White’s lecture is “The Price of the Ticket: Paying for Diversity and Inclusion,” which she will deliver at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21. This will be a virtual, online event.

Along with delivering the Gilder-Jordan Lecture, White will meet online with graduate students from across the UM campus at 9 a.m. to discuss her work with the Rutgers students who researched and wrote most of the essays published in Rutgers’ “Scarlet and Black” university history. Her discussion with graduate students will cover the value of this kind of research, including the benefits of researching outside of one’s field of expertise, doing collaborative work, entering the job market with published material, and learning the ins and outs of academic publishing. If you are a UM graduate student interested in this session, register here.

Deborah Gray White is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is a specialist in the history of African American women. Author of “Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South” and “Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994,” White is also editor of “Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower,” a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of Black women into the historical profession and the development of the field of Black women’s history. She currently codirects the “Scarlet and Black Project,” which investigates American Indians and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University.

Organized through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the African American studies program, Center for Civil War Research, and the Department of History, the Gilder-Jordan Speaker Series is made possible through the generosity of the Gilder Foundation, Inc. The series honors the late Richard Gilder of New York and his family, as well as University of Mississippi alumni Dan and Lou Jordan of Virginia.

Register for White’s lecture here. 

Heritage and Hate: Old South Words and Symbols at Southern Universities

Stephen Monroe and LaToya Faulk

In this SouthTalk, Stephen Monroe and LaToya Faulk will discuss Monroe’s new book, “Heritage and Hate: Old South Words and Symbols at Southern Universities,” which traces the ongoing rhetorical power of Old South words and symbols at southern universities.

Stephen Monroe is chair and assistant Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, where he is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, a steering committee member for the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, and director of the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing. His book, “Heritage and Hate: Old South Words and Symbols at Southern Universities,” was published in June as part of the “Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique” series from the University of Alabama Press.

LaToya Faulk has a BA in English literature and an MA in rhetoric and writing from Michigan State University. She teaches in the Department of Writing Rhetoric and is also a MFA fiction student at the University of Mississippi. Her work has been published in Scalawag, Southwest Review, Amherst College’s the Common, and Splinter Magazine’s Think Local series.

SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. However, as a result of the ongoing health crisis, many events will be virtual, free, and made accessible on the Center’s YouTube channel after each live event. Visit the Center’s website for information about all Center events. Registration will be required for all events in order to receive the event link.

“The Land of Open Graves: Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life and Death along the U.S.-Mexico Border” by Jason De León

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. federal government has relied on a border enforcement strategy known as Prevention through Deterrence. Using various security infrastructure and techniques of surveillance, this strategy funnels undocumented migrants toward remote and rugged terrain such as the Sonoran Desert of Arizona with the hope that mountain ranges, extreme temperatures, and other natural obstacles will deter people from unauthorized entry. Hundreds of people perish annually while undertaking this dangerous activity. Since 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project has used a combination of forensic, archaeological, and ethnographic approaches to understand the various forms of violence that characterize the social process of clandestine migration. On Thursday, September 30, at 4:00 p.m., Jason De León will present a lecture that focuses on what happens to the bodies of migrants who die in the desert. He argues that the way that bodies decompose in this environment is a form of hidden political violence that has deep ideological roots, and he demonstrates how the postmortem destruction of migrant corpses creates devastating forms of long-lasting trauma.

Jason De León is a professor of anthropology and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American studies at UCLA. He is executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research-arts-education collective that seeks to document and raise awareness about the experiences of clandestine migrants, and president of the board of directors for the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that seeks to identify and repatriate the remains of people who have died while migrating through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. De León is the author of the award-winning book “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” and is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.

This lecture is part of the Movement and Migration/Future of the South Initiative, launched by Simone Delerme in 2019. An accompanying exhibit, Hostile Terrain, will be on display in Lamar Hall beginning on Oct. 15. This lecture is tentatively taking place in-person at the Nutt Auditorium on the University of Mississippi campus. Please visit the Center website for any updates to the location or format.

De León’s visit is cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, the Center for Population Studies, the McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement, the Center for Inclusion and Cross-Cultural Engagement, and the Croft Institute for International Studies.

On Wednesday, Oct. 6 at 7:30 p.m. at the Gertrude Ford Center for the Performing Arts, in a production of “The Fannie Lou Hamer Story,” Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye channels Fannie Lou Hamer in a riveting 60-minute journey of storytelling showered with eleven inspiring songs and a video montage of the civil rights movement.  The Fannie Lou Hamer Story is part of the Ford Center’s Artist Series, which is supported by the University of Mississippi and in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and The Center for Inclusion and Cross Cultural Engagement. Tickets are available here.

At noon Nov. 3 in the Paris-Yates Chapel on the University of Mississippi campus, Adam Guettel, Blake McIver and Mary Donnelly Haskell will have a conversation about Elizabeth Spencer’s novella “The Light in the Piazza,” which was made into a musical.

In celebration of Mississippi writer Elizabeth Spencer’s one hundredth birthday, the University of Mississippi Department of Music is staging a November 2021 production of “The Light in the Piazza,” a musical based on Spencer’s novella of the same name. In conjunction with this production, the department is presenting Piazza composer, lyricist, and orchestrator Adam Guettel in a residency of public programing that explores Spencer, her novella, Guettel’s rationale for and process of creating a musical from Spencer’s work, and the themes, characters and concepts revealed in both pieces.

Guettel is a composer steeped in the opera and musical theatre traditions of America. The grandson of Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein) and son of writer/composer Mary Rodgers, Guettel is well-versed in the history of American musical theatre forms. As a Tony Award-winning composer in his own right, his work is helping move those forms forward. “The Light in the Piazza” was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won six, including two for Guettel for original score and orchestration.