Southern Studies 2008 Graduates and Award Winners
The faculty and staff of the Center for the Study of Southern
Culture and Southern Studies department offer heartfelt congratulations to our bachelor’s and master’s degree students who graduated this spring.
Bachelor of Arts in Southern Studies
Erin Boles, Oxford, Mississipppi
Carol Holmes, Franklin, Tennessee
Zachary Leeds, Amory, Mississippi
Elizabeth Oliphant, Oxford, Mississippi
Master of Arts in Southern Studies
Sarah Abdelnour, Columbia, South Carolina
Miranda Cully, Gassville, Arkansas
Rebecca Domm, Columbia, Tennessee
Jane Harrison Fisher, Oxford, Mississippi
L. V. McNeal, Leakesville, Mississippi
Sarah Sheffield, Columbus, Mississippi
Rebecca Walton, Friendsville, Tennessee
Hicks Wogan, Metairie, Louisiana
Southern Studies Awards
Thanks to all the faculty who nominated papers for this year’s prizes. The winners are below:
Lucille and Motee Daniels Award
Becca Walton for her thesis paper “Imagining the Unimaginable: Witnessing Trauma in the Post-Segregation South”
Gray Award
Elizabeth Oliphant for her honors thesis paper “The Construction of Womanhood and Race in Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride and Eoline and Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah and Macaria”
Coterie Award
Andrew Mullins for his SST 401 paper “The Southern Horror Film and the American Subconscious”
Peter Aschoff Prize
Jake Fussell for his SST 401 paper “‘A Great Musician with a High Position’: Black and White Interchange in Traditional Southern Music”
Southern Studies Faculty News
The biggest news among Southern Studies faculty involves people leaving for new positions, some permanent and some temporary. Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies, will leave Southern Studies in the Fall of 2008. After ten years on the faculty and numerous contributions to the curriculum, especially on topics of Native American Studies, cultural theory, and environmental topics, numerous thesis committees, and extraordinary production as a scholar, Robbie will become a full-time member of the Anthropology faculty. We’ll miss her, but in fact she is not going far away and, as an associate faculty member, she will continue teaching courses Southern Studies students can take.
Three faculty members will be on leave for all or part of 2008–2009. Adam Gussow is taking his sabbatical all year to work on a new project on literal and figurative crossroads in the blues. That is a venerable blues theme, and one that can use some exciting ideas through the lens of literary scholarship. Nancy Bercaw received a fellowship for the
2008–2009 school year to research and write at the Huntington Library in California. Her project examines why different arms of the U.S. government were interested in collecting different body parts from Native Americans and African Americans in the late 1800s. Charles Reagan Wilson, ever the multitasker, will be on leave during spring 2009 to pursue multiple book projects.
The Southern Studies faculty who will be on campus for the entire year, Kathryn McKee, David Wharton, and Ted
Ownby, will benefit from one new full-time faculty member in History and Southern Studies, Justin Nystrom from the University of Georgia, and some new part-time faculty.
This may also be a good time to mention that Southern Studies alumni are joining various faculties. Molly McGehee received her PhD at Emory and took a job teaching Southern Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. After completing his PhD in History at the University of North Carolina, Kerry Taylor has taken a job in the History Department at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. For the past year, Anne Evans has been teaching writing at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado. Bert Way received his PhD in History at the University of Georgia and will spend next year on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Carolina. And one of our alumni still in graduate school—Amy Schmidt, pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Arkansas—is the associate editor of an important book due out next year, The Civil Rights Reader, edited by Julie Buckner Armstrong, published by the University of Georgia Press.
TED OWNBY
Ownby Participates in Distinguished Lectureship Program
Ted Ownby, interim director of the Center, has been chosen to participate in the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program.
“This is an especially appealing honor because I get to do something that I like—talk about Southern history—in a way that benefits a group I really admire—the Organization of American Historians,” said Ownby, who is a professor of History and Southern Studies.
Ownby has been part of the University faculty for 20 years. He is the author of numerous article publications and has provided the organization with a list of possible lecture topics including “‘Is There Still an American South?’ A Historian Critiques the Question” and “Shopping in Mississippi History.” He is currently coediting the Mississippi Encyclopedia, which is to be published in 2009.
The Organization of American Historians, according to its mission statement, “promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, and encourages wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history.” OAH is the largest learned society devoted to the study of American history. Presidents of the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program have been appointing their most illustrious and dynamic colleagues to the program for more than 25 years to lecture at institutions.
“The OAH has been a leader in trying out innovative approaches to scholarship and teaching, so I am happy to get to be part of its group of lectures,” said Ownby.
CHRISTINA LOPEZ
