Director's Column

Graduation day puts an annual exclamation mark on the academic work of the Center. Southern Studies hosted a brunch for our graduates and their families on May 8, and it was a joyous occasion. We host many high-profile conferences and publish acclaimed books, but graduation reminded me of how central our curriculum is to defining the Center.

The everyday work of lectures, class discussions, examinations, and research papers about Southern culture prepares our students to make a profound impact through jobs that enable them to study, preserve, interpret, and teach about the American South—which is the overall mission of the Center itself. The Center’s core faculty are simply superb in working with students. Their research has led to award-winning monographs and significant scholarly articles establishing them as leaders in their disciplines and collectively making for interdisciplinary perspectives for our students to absorb.

The undergraduate program began early in the Center’s history as the result of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that enabled planning for a bachelor’s degree in Southern Studies, and we are still the place to come to for that pedigree. We added the master’s program in 1987, and it has now grown to around 20 students. In the last few years students have come with undergraduate degrees from such universities as the University of Virginia, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of South Carolina and from such smaller liberal arts institutions as Bowdoin, Kenyon, Furman, the University of the South, and Millsaps.

Our students go on for further graduate work, earning doctorates at Emory, the University of Texas, Brown, Ohio State, Auburn, and the universities of Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. They are now professors at Vanderbilt, Illinois State, and Smith College.

Other graduates are shaping Southern cultural development, working at museums, arts alliances, research centers, and folklore programs. Several Southern Studies alumni have been leaders in state humanities councils and state archives. Others work in media, including at CNN and for Southern Living magazine.

Thanks to donors, the Center gives awards, with a cash stipend, to honor student research papers. The Gray-Coterie Awards honor undergraduate papers, and this year’s winners are Amanda Brown, for her paper on the old burying ground in Savannah, Georgia, and Summer Hill, for her paper on Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi.

The Lucille and Motee Daniels Award goes to the best Southern Studies graduate paper, and this year’s winner is Richie Caldwell for “‘An Ambassador from a New Mississippi’: A Proposal for Scholarship at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture,” which makes the case for the significance of writer Willie Morris’s work. The newest Center honor, the Peter Aschoff Award, goes to the best paper on music in the South, and Rob Hawkins won for “Living the Gospel Blues: Religion and Respectability in the Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey, Reverend Gary David, and Blind Willie Johnson.” The judge of the competition notes that Hawkins’s paper “is an original and powerfully argued piece of blues scholarship.”

We congratulate these award winners and all the students in Southern Studies. They represent the next generation of leaders in Southern cultural development, and they are one of the Center’s great contributions.

Charles Reagan Wilson