Director's Column
     The spring semester ended with a lovely graduation day ceremony, sandwiched between unusually stormy days in Mississippi. The ritual end of the academic year and the coming of spring have caused me to reflect on Center work in recent months and to look ahead to what is coming next. It was a lively semester, punctuated by several major events. The Southern Studies Faculty Forum showcased the research of our core faculty, showing the range of interests and achievement of their work. As interdisciplinary scholars, they drew from theoretical literature, diverse primary sources, and provocative ideas. It was work in progress, and those in attendance caught glimpses of future major studies. As part of the Center’s 25th anniversary celebration, the Faculty Forum represented a new dialogue among our faculty, which we hope will always continue.
     The first "Blues Today Symposium" took place in February, a new extension of the Center’s long interest in studying blues music. It brought together academics, music critics, and performers, in an altogether distinctive and stimulating forum. African American critic Stanley Crouch gave the keynote address, and one panel featured blues musicians Little Milton, Willie King, and Bobby Rush talking about the blues—this after performing a concert the night before. Commentators talk too much about the death of the blues. Anyone in Mississippi knows it is alive and well, different from the past surely, but supported by a new generation of performers and new venues in festivals and in clubs, such as Isaac Byrd’s 630 Blues Café in Jackson and Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett’s Ground Zero in Clarksdale. Living Blues magazine is now involved in efforts to bring increased appreciation of the blues through working with other parties throughout the state to promote the blues as part of cultural tourism.
     The Oxford Conference for the Book quietly celebrated its 10th anniversary in April, with a meeting that honored novelist, dramatist, and critic Stark Young. It also highlighted bright young novelists like Calvin Baker and Scott Morris, wild men like George Singleton (read The Half-Mammals of Dixie and you will know why he is wild), and the prolific Percival Everett. Ted Ownby moderated one of my favorite sessions, a panel on "Writing Memoirs" that included the typical diversity of three seemingly unrelated memoirists, whose commonalities and differences made for fascinating listening. The conference every year also features local talent, as this year with David Galef and students in the University’s creative writing program. The Oxford Conference for the Book has become a community mainstay, and this year brought people from two dozen states to enjoy one of the South’s premier literary festivals.
     Our next conferences will draw attention to our new initiative to study the environment in the South. The initiative is not entirely new, as we began this effort several years ago with a year-long Southern Studies Colloquium on the environment, during which we brought in Scott Slovic, director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of Nevada, as consultant to think about ways to highlight our interest in the environment. This year’s Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 20-24, will focus on "Faulkner and the Ecology of the South," and the theme of the Porter L. Fortune History Symposium, September 17-19, will be "The Environment and Southern History." These two meetings will bring scholars to campus to explore literary and historical dimensions on a topic with broad interdisciplinary appeal.
     Much of the study of the environment has been in the West, but we hope these meetings, and the Center’s continued interest in the environment, will give new momentum to a field of Southern environmental studies. As part of this initiative, David Wharton, director of Documentary Studies, is working with the Audubon Society in Mississippi to launch a new documentary fieldwork project at Strawberry Plains, a major environmental preserve in Marshall County, Mississippi. Finally, we are working with Bob Haws, chair of the Department of History and the Center’s foreign secretary, and Joe Urgo, chair of the Department of English, to attract international scholars to the University to take part in these environmental-focused events and other projects.
     We invite all the readers of the Southern Register to take part in our conferences as we pursue long interests in the blues and literature and as we build on our new interest in the Southern environment.

                                         Charles Reagan Wilson