Director's Column

This year will be a special one for all of us associated with the Center. We began our work 25 years ago, and a quarter-century anniversary gives pause for reflection, for considering the past, present, and future. We hope to involve our friends in Center activities more than ever before, and we will soon have a calendar of events for the coming year.

The Center formally began with a Eudora Welty Symposium in November 1977. Ann Abadie was acting director then, with Bill Ferris, our founding director, arriving in 1979. I joined them in 1981 to work on the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. We began publishing Living Blues® in 1983, and other Center projects soon followed. From the beginning, our academic work anchored other Center activities. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant helped us implement the distinctive, interdisciplinary Southern Studies curriculum. We began with a bachelor of arts degree, adding the master’s in 1986. Our core faculty have always provided leadership for Center projects, and an extended network of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts assist with our academic program and other Center activities.

One of our most important support groups is the Friends of the Center. Our newsletter, Southern Register, connects us to 30,000 people, and we depend on each of you for moral and financial support. I often receive letters from newsletter readers who want to know more about Center work and ways they can assist. Jim and Madeleine McMullan, chairs of our Advisory Committee who helped establish two Southern Studies faculty positions, learned of the Center’s potential through reading the newsletter and becoming Friends of the Center.

The financial contributions that readers can make through our Friends group provide the operating funds to enable us to support publication of the newsletter, provide assistantships to graduate students, sponsor the Oxford Conference for the Book, and work on countless other projects.

Tennessee Williams, who is being honored at this year’s Oxford Conference for the Book, had a character say that she depended "on the kindness of strangers." For 25 years, the Center has educated students, published books and magazines, held conferences that encouraged significant research, and generally nurtured the study of Southern culture—all partly through the generosity of, not strangers, but friends. We regard all of you as friends because you know of Center projects and appreciate our contributions. We hope you will enjoy knowing about the Center’s activities this special year and help us build a strong foundation for our future growth.

Charles Reagan Wilson