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Ted Ownby Named Director of Center

After searching far and wide for a new director for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, it turns out the ideal candidate was in the Center’s own backyard. Former interim director Ted Ownby, professor of History and Southern Studies, was chosen to take the helm as permanent director in December.

“We did a full scale, international search, and we had lots of candidates who applied and visited campus and at the end of the process we had not hired anyone,” Ownby said. So this fall, he decided to apply.

Ownby, who earned his BA from Vanderbilt and MA and doctorate from Johns Hopkins, is a coeditor of the forthcoming Mississippi Encyclopedia and coeditor of the Gender volume in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. He is the author of two books, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 and American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998, and he has edited collections of essays on slavery, the role of ideas in the civil rights movement, and manners in Southern history.

He said he enjoys working with the wide range of people and activities at the Center. “I realized a long time ago that part of what attracts people to Southern Studies is the freedom to be creative, through interdisciplinary scholarship or through connections between scholarship and the rest of the world. That freedom has brought the Center people who have unique abilities,” Ownby said. “The Center encourages new ideas, and our academic program draws majors and graduate students who are willing to have a unique degree. The students tend to be open-minded and have their own ideas about what an education should be, and our faculty and staff both respond to and help shape a lot of those ideas.”

Ownby says that it is crucial that Southern Studies keeps changing. “Part of the excitement of this program is that the students change, academia certainly changes, and the South itself keeps changing. Part of our job is to take the topics that bring people to Southern Studies, study those topics well, and also to expand the range of topics to study. A lot of people assume that Southern Studies is about just one or two things—that it’s about race, or poverty. Or it’s about religion, or literature, or music. Or that it’s all wrapped up in a history where the concept of the South used to matter to a lot of people but doesn’t matter so much anymore. Or that it’s about what C. Vann Woodward called ‘the burden of Southern history.’” Ownby continues, “In fact, Southern Studies is about all those things, but it is about more than that, and it is always changing.”

Glenn Hopkins, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said Ownby was a perfect fit for the Center. “Ted Ownby has been a member of the faculty of the Center for 20 years and is intimately familiar with all aspects of the Center’s work,” said Hopkins. “This knowledge, along with his leadership and deep belief in the mission of the Center, made him an obvious choice for director.”

To Ownby, being director means trying to be a partner with numerous ongoing projects, including Living Blues, the Oxford Conference for the Book, the Southern Foodways Alliance, two encyclopedias, and documentary projects.

“I think that everything starts with teaching and academics,” Ownby said. “I want to keep building new partnerships inside and outside the University, and encourage Center faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends to think of big, new ideas. The Center has done some extraordinary and far-sighted things and we need to keep looking ahead. I look forward to seeing what happens next.”

 

Beyond that, there is another reason Ownby continues after two decades at the University. “Being at the Center has been a way for me to be part of a pretty exciting set of projects and questions and possibilities. We study serious things, but it’s usually fun here,” he said.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary