Charles Reagan Wilson took his baccalaureate and master’s degrees at the University of Texas at El Paso and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to the University of Mississippi in 1981 as a professor of history and Southern Studies, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, and Texas Tech University. For a number of years he was the director of the Southern Studies academic program in the Center. He has published widely and has given numerous papers at scholarly conferences. He was coeditor (with William Ferris) of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and has edited a number of books. He is the author of Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis and Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. Wilson has been director of the Center since 1998. Gerald W. Walton, provost emeritus, interviewed Wilson at the University of Mississippi on January 7, 2003.

    Gerald W. Walton: Charles, tell me when you first heard of something called the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

   Charles Reagan Wilson: I first heard about the Center when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation supervisor, William Goetzman, knew about the Center. He was the president of the American Studies Association in 1977, the year that I finished my doctorate. He mentioned the Center to me, and that was my first time to hear about it. Later, when I was teaching at Texas Tech University in 1981, I saw an ad for a joint appointment in history and Southern Studies. I applied for that position and was one of the two on-campus finalists. Jim Cobb got that position. That was the early summer of 1981, and in, I guess, May they must have gotten the grant for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and they sent me a letter; so I applied for that.

   GWW: When you came here for an interview, what was your thinking about what the Center might be and how you might play a part in that?

   CRW: I thought it was very exciting, and with my interests, it seemed like a wonderful match. I had been trained in Southern history. I was in Texas, and I always felt too far West to be studying Southern history in effect; and I wanted to go to Mississippi, which I knew would be an ideal spot from which to contemplate Southern history. I was interested in interdisciplinary studies, with Goetzman my mentor in American Studies. I had taken a lot of courses in interdisciplinary studies. I had worked during the summer of 1980 in an NEH summer institute with John Shelton Reed of Chapel Hill. That was a very formative experience, which really got me thinking about Southern Studies as an interdisciplinary field. And so I found here a Center that is dedicated to all of these things in a sense. I liked the idea that it had a curriculum, and I thought that was important, and there were many opportunities for research projects. I applied for the academic position, and then I heard of the encyclopedia. Those are the two things that I, in particular, was focused on. I saw great potential for the Center.

   GWW: Now, you were in Texas, but you had some early Tennessee connections?

complete interview