Director's Column

Graduation day 2002 began for Southern Studies with a morning breakfast for students, parents, and faculty, in the courtyard of Barnard Observatory. Since graduation ceremonies started early, breakfast in this lovely setting began at 7:30 a.m., and coffee and orange juice helped everyone prepare for the day—or at least to wake up. Muffins and other pastries from Oxford’s Bottletree Bakery, owned by Southern Studies alumna Cynthia Gerlach, sent students off, ready to march into the Grove to celebrate their achievements.
By the end of the summer, 10 of our students will have graduated this year with master of arts degrees in Southern Studies. We remain the only University that gives the Southern Studies degree, and our students come from near and far for its interdisciplinary curriculum. This year, our students have worked on theses on, among other topics, Southern foodways, the dulcimer, and the revolutionary impact of Elvis Presley on gender relations in the South. One student, Sally Monroe, completed a documentary studies photography project she had begun as a Southern Studies undergraduate major. She used family photographs, interviews, and commentary family members wrote on the photographs to document her family and community over three generations. 
Other graduate students offered colloquia that presented the results of internships. One student gave a presentation on her internship at the Southern Cultural Heritage Complex, one of the most important community cultural institutions in Mississippi. Another student worked with the University’s “Steps to Success” program, which encourages academic success and personal achievement among the University’s underrepresented populations in order to retain students who begin college here. Another student worked in Thad Cochran’s Oxford office, and his research paper compared several generations of Mississippi politicians, including Cochran. Patricia Reis, a Brazilian student who studied with us, presented results of her work with a Memphis musical festival and told of how she hopes to implement a regional studies program when she returns to Brazil.
The Center works hard to provide financial aid to our graduate students, and much of our effort rests on donations from Friends of the Center. The University provides only limited funding for assistantships, funding only three at minimum levels of aid. The Center includes graduate stipends, when possible, in grant proposals and other outside aid. Most of the funding to support graduate students, though, comes from donations from our annual fund drives.
This year, during our 25th anniversary, we are systematically sending a letter to everyone on our 30,000 name database, asking everyone to join Friends of the Center and contribute to our fundraising efforts. The mailings will go out periodically over the next year or so, and some of you reading this may already have been contacted. 
A quarter-century anniversary is a landmark, and work with students provides much of our continuity. Alumni have gone on to work in museums, art galleries, research centers, and archives. Several of our students work for Southern Living magazine, and one is in Atlanta with CNN. Three of our graduates work with state humanities councils, and a dozen or so have earned doctorates in American Studies, history, or literature. Alumni Susan Glisson and John T. Edge have even returned to the Center to work with, respectively, the Institute for Racial Reconciliation and the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Friends of the Center has supported our students as they prepare for cultural work that extends the Center’s approach throughout the South and beyond. They put a face on our work, and we continue to depend on the generosity of our Friends to help us provide resources to keep Southern Studies “telling about the South.”

Charles Reagan Wilson