Alumni Bookshelf

The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos:
Shifting Attitudes toward Competition

by Joel Nathan Rosen

MA 1993

Joel Rosen earned his PhD at the University of Kent (U.K.) and is now an assistant professor of sociology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His work has been published in Nine, Sociology of Sport Journal, Media History Monographs and Journal of Mundane Behavior. His research focuses primarily on the relationship between human activity and stratification as informed by cultural idioms such as music and sport. His master’s thesis in Southern Studies was titled “Toward Mound Bayou: An Analysis of the Ideology of Robert Owen and Its Legacy at Davis Bend, Mississippi.” His first book, The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes toward Competition, was published in 2007 by McFarland and Company.


The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Volume IV 

Labor and the Cold War at the Grassroots

by Kieran Walsh Taylor
MA 1998

Kerry Taylor is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and coeditor of The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958 and Labor and the Cold War at the Grassroots: Unions, Politics, and Postwar Political Culture. He is currently working on a study of radicals in the labor movement in the 1970s. His Southern Studies master’s thesis was titled “I Done Made My Mind Up: The Legacy of the Providence Cooperative Farm.”

"Stony the Road" to Change: Black Mississippians and the Cultire of Social Relations

by Marylin M. Thomas-Houston
MA 1989
Marilyn Thomas-Houston is associate professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Florida. “Stony the Road” to Change: Black Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, examines the black community if Oxford, Mississippi, during the height of the civil rights movements of the 1960s.

With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside

by Joe York
MA 2007
Joe York currently works at the University of Mississippi’s fledging Center for Documentary Projects where he continues to make short films for the Southern Foodways Alliance (13 films so far) and produce the Center’s Highway 61 radio show with host Scott Barretta. In August of 2007, his book of photographs With Signs Following: Photographs from the Southern Religious Roadside was published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book is an adaptation of his MA thesis in Southern Studies and features an introduction from former Center Director Charles Reagan Wilson.