Center for the Study of the American South

What's New at the Center

The 7th Annual Global American South Conference, February 8 & 9 -- Register Now!
 

“Southern Sounds/Out of Bounds: Music and the Global American South,” is presented by the Center for Global Initiatives and the Center for the Study of the American South, in collaboration with Carolina Performing Arts. Karl Hagstrom Miller (University of Texas at Austin) will deliver CSAS's Chandler Lecture in Southern Business History as the conference keynote on Saturday, February 9, at 1:30 pm. FedEx Global Education Center, UNC-CH. More information, including registration and affiliated performances, at the conference website here.

Summer Research Grants

The application deadline for the 2013 Summer Research Grants is February 28, 2013.

UNC graduate and professional students are encouraged to apply for awards of up to $3,000 that can be used for summer research, including dissertation research, thesis research, and other academic projects including those with a component of engaged scholarship. Proposals are welcome from graduate and professional students in any discipline. The summer research grant can be used for direct research costs and/or a stipend to support the student’s full effort toward research for an extended period.

For more information about the 2013 Summer Research Grants, please click here.

Hutchins Lecture with Documentary Photographers Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, Thursday, November 29, 4:30 pm
 

The Center is pleased to welcome distinguished documentary photographers Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian this fall. Select photographs from their collaborative work on death row culture, titled "In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America," will be on view through the Fall 2012 semester at the Love House and Hutchins Forum. Please join us when we host Jackson and Christian at a closing reception on Wednesday, November 28, and a corresponding Hutchins Lecture the following day, November 29. We encourage lecture attendees to visit the exhibition by November 29, as the lecture will focus on the photographs on display (also collected in a new book of the same title) and their more than thirty years working together. 

November 28 – Closing reception for "In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America." 5:30pm, Love House and Hutchins Forum. 

November 29 – Hutchins Lecture with Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, a lecture in conjunction with their exhibit at the Center for the Study of the American South. Introduced by Bill Ferris, senior associate director, Center for the Study of the American South, and Tom Rankin, director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. 4:30 pm, Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, 039 Graham Memorial Hall, UNC campus.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: 7th Annual Global American South Conference
 

"Southern Sounds/Out of Bounds: Music and the Global American South"
February 8-9, 2013
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Presented by the Center for Global Initiatives and the Center for the Study of the American South, in collaboration with Carolina Performing Arts and TEDxUNC. For conference and submission details, please click here.

CSAS Postdoc Anderson Blanton Wins Grant to Study Appalachian Pentecostal Prayer Tradition
 

Anderson Blanton, a postdoctoral student at the Center in 2011-12, has won a prestigious two-year grant from the Social Science Research Council to continue his research on the use of prayer cloths in the Pentecostal tradition. His project, "Prayer Cloths, or, the Materiality of Divine Communication," is one of 28 projects to receive funding under the SSRC's "New Directions in the Study of Prayer" program. This program, offered with support from the John Templeton Foundation, fosters research on the practice of prayer, encouraging interdisciplinary conversations among scholars who study prayer. 

Blanton holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. He earned a B.A. in cultural anthropology in 2002 from UNC-Chapel Hill. As a postdoc at the Center last year, he participated with a team who taught an introductory Southern Studies course (cross-listed with American Studies, Folklore, and Cultural Anthropology), on topics including the styles of sermons in the Pentecostal tradition, glossolalia, and theories of representation as related to the construction of everyday understandings of Appalachia. During the two-year fellowship he will remain based at the Center, while he pursues his research into a number of Independent Pentecostal church communities in northwestern Virginia.

Southern Research Circle Poster Session, October 4, 4pm

Summer Grant Poster Session
Thursday, October 4, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
The Love House and Hutchins Forum

You are invited to a poster session presented by the graduate and professional students who were awarded summer research grants in 2012. Fourteen students from the fields of history, anthropology, folklore, religious studies, and geography will showcase their research related to the American South.

SOHP Receives Collaborative Research Grant from the NEH

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $150,000 Collaborative Research Grant to the SOHP for "Eyewitnesses to the Movement: Black, White, and Multiracial Media in Civil Rights-Era North Carolina," a project spearheaded by our Digital Humanities Coordinator Seth Kotch in collaboration with historian Josh Davis. The project seeks to create a local, ground-up history of the Civil Rights movement in NC through roughly 50 interviews with journalists who covered the movement in newspapers, television, radio, and other formats. The idea behind the project is that histories of the media and the movement often take a bird's eye view that fails to analyze how local southern media reported on and contributed to the movement in ways very different from that of the national press. Congratulations to Seth and the SOHP!

Just Released: The Southern Cultures Election-Year Politics Issue
 

Right on time for the ramp-up to the November presidential election comes the 2012 Politics Issue from Southern Cultures. Read the Bill Clinton interview, Guest Editor Ferrel Guillory's lead essay exploring 5 Big Things You Need to Know About the South for this Election, and much more in our second special issue on Politics. It's availble now in print, online through Project Muse, and for Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader. Individual articles are available, too, through Kindle, by following the links here. (You can also read our first Politics issue here.)

SOHP Launches Undergraduate Internship Program
 

The Southern Oral History Program is pleased to welcome five UNC undergraduates to our new internship program. Ivanna Gonzalez, Edward Pruette, Oliver Rose, Meg VanDeusen, and Natalie Warner will work with SOHP field scholar Joey Fink and Undergraduate Internship Coordinator Elizabeth McCain throughout the Fall 2012 semester. In addition to developing their own individual oral history projects, our interns will work with SOHP and CSAS staff in a number of areas, including event planning, communications, collections management, and interview processing. They will also forge new connections and collaborations between the SOHP and the undergraduate community through workshops, events, and partnerships. Stay tuned for further announcements of their important work to come. 

Professor Jocelyn Neal named new Director of the Center for the Study of the American South
 

Professor Jocelyn Neal is the new Director of the Center for the Study of the American South effective July 1, 2012. Jocelyn Neal is Associate Professor of Music and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies. Her primary areas of research are commercial country music and American popular music. She is the author of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers (Indiana University Press, 2009), which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Since 2009, Professor Neal has served as co-editor of Southern Cultures, a noted journal published by the Center for the Study of the American South. She has been a Fellow at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory and has served as chair of the Popular Music Group for the Society of Music Theory.

Professor Neal replaces Professor Harry Watson, a major historian of the antebellum South and Jacksonian America, who has directed the Center since 1999. The College is grateful to Harry for his extensive service in developing the Center into a leader in the field. 

SOHP on WUNC-FM
 

Each Friday morning this past March, WUNC’s Eric Hodge of "Morning Edition was joined by Seth Kotch from the Southern Oral History Program. Kotch and a team of oral historians recently completed a new series of never-before-heard interviews with activists, leaders and lay-people about the Civil Rights Movement. They listened to and talked about these very additions to the collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The interviews will also be archived at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. Listen to the archived conversations here.

SOHP's Community Partner Hits the Airwaves
 

One of SOHP's community partners, the Jackson Center's Fusion Youth Radio, was selected by Youthcast to be featured in their bi-weekly podcast.Fusion Youth Radio (FYR) is the Center's new, live, radio program on WXYC 89.3 that is rooted in the idea that our youth must work together to take active roles in shaping the futures of our communities.