CRW: Yes, I was born in Nashville, and my family on both sides were from little towns north of Nashville; so we were the pioneers who had gone out West as far as the rest of the family was concerned. We would go back every summer to visit my grandparents and aunts and uncles in this little town called Greenbrier and in Nashville too. We moved to El Paso when I was nine years old. I was growing up in this very bicultural Hispanic area, very cosmopolitan. There was a suburban high school. I very much grew up  thinking of myself as a Southerner because my parents were very much Southern--the kinds of food we ate, the church we went to, all of that strong sense of family. I discovered I was a Southerner playing with kids named Juan and Jesus on playgrounds, knowing I was different from them. I have always thought the experience made me interested in culture and different kinds of cultures.

   GWW: What was your dissertation topic?

   CRW: My dissertation was on religious attitudes toward the Civil War, toward the Confederacy after the war was over. It was called “Baptisms of Blood.”

   GWW: And did that develop into your first book?

   CRW: Yes, it did. I cut out a hundred pages of precious prose and reorganized it, shortened it, and tightened it up. That became my first book, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause.

   GWW: For readers who may not be familiar with it, what kind of reception did your book receive?

   CRW: It received a very good reception–in two areas. One was among Southern historians. I think it opened a new way of thinking about the impact of the Civil War, the religious aspect of this sense of memory. The second area of influence was in religious studies because it grew on the idea of civil religion, public religion. There has been a lot growth in that area during the 20 years since the book came out.

   GWW: We know something of the success of the encyclopedia. Tell me some of the day-to-day frustrations you faced as you were trying to put that thing together.

   CRW: Dealing with contributors. I like to remember it as a great lesson in human psychology. There was the problem of getting people, first of all, to agree to do the articles. When I first started, I thought “Well, this is simple. There are people who have written on these topics. They will be the logical ones to do them. They will turn them in on time. The articles will all be well written. The authors have published books and articles.” There was frustration in things not turning out that way. Dealing with contributors was then often a frustration, but often rewarding. Sometimes the authors would send their articles in right on time, and they would be beautiful. At other times the articles would be messy and sloppy. Keeping up with the paper work was difficult--a massive amount of letters to be written, phone calls reminding people, just the sheer flow of materials to keep up with.

   GWW: While you were in the middle of that, did you ever dream the encyclopedia would become as highly acclaimed as it did?

   CRW: Never. No, never. I really felt good about it all along. When I came here, I spent a lot of that first semester studying reference books. I spent a lot of time in the reference room of the library.  I learned about classic encyclopedias, about what was happening, new ways of doing encyclopedias, and all of that. I therefore felt like we were doing a solid, respectable job, but I had no idea of--could not anticipate--the impact across disciplines and the kind of public appeal as well.

   GWW: What is the status of beyond that encyclopedia now?

CRW: Well, we are doing a second edition of the encyclopedia. We are doing it in a different format. It will be a series of paperback volumes; so we will be updating. We are well into this process; we have about five volumes that I hope to send to the University of North Carolina Press in the fall. We have added some new subject areas. Originally we had 24 subject areas, and now we have added a couple of new ones--like folk art and foodways, reflecting new interests. We have retitled some, reflecting the way scholarship has gone. What was “Black Life” we are now entitling “Race,” and we are adding articles things related to race relations as well as just black life. The section having to do with women’s life we are retitling “Gender,” to reflect what has been going on in terms of gender as a whole system of men and women. Then we are adding, of course, a lot of new articles to reflect changes in religion. For example, we are adding articles on Latino religion, on Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism that were not in the original work.

   GWW: Charles, when you were giving thought to being considered for the director position, what kinds of things entered your mind--things you would be giving up if you became director, and that sort of thing?

   CRW: Well, first of all I knew there would be more administrative work (more meetings, more memos), which I don’t particularly like to do. I knew I would be taking on a lot of new responsibility. I like to teach. I have always worked closely with students. I work with a lot of graduate students in terms of dissertations and theses. When Bill Ferris left and I became director, his parting advice was that the job was too big; there is too much going on--academic work along with the administrative work of managing projects and fund raising, and all this. I have grown to see that he is correct. There is a lot going on, and I knew balancing and juggling everything would be a challenge; and it’s actually gotten more challenging the longer time has gone on, partly because we have been doing more fund raising, more systematic fund raising over the last two years. Of course, this 25th anniversary makes it a prime opportunity.

   GWW: How has being director affected your scholarship? Have you been able to do the kinds of things you wanted to do, or have you had to substitute administrative work--encyclopedia work, for example--for what you might have done?

   CRW: Yes, I am substituting encyclopedia work and other projects for a lot of my own work. That is probably my biggest frustration: I have several books that I am well into, and I have not finished those; I spend time on managing projects. Work with the encyclopedia is such a big job that I am required to write a lot.

   GWW: You mentioned working with graduate students. When we started the program, we had questions about whether we should even have a major for undergraduates. And there were a lot of questions about whether we could ever make a master’s-level program go. How is the master’s program doing now?

   CRW: It is doing great. Every year it seems to me the quality of the students gets better and better--the undergraduate programs they are coming from, their interests, and so forth. When we started, we had the first two students who were graduates of the undergraduate Southern Studies Program. I didn’t think the program would ever get very big, but within a few years, because it is a unique program, we began attracting a lot of very diverse students. Especially back then, we had a real range of ages, older people who came back to school because they saw this as an opportunity to do oral history work or do projects they had wanted to do. There was a real range of interests, and now the academic qualifications have become better and better.

   GWW: Have you been surprised at where these students have come from, their undergraduate degree programs?

CRW: I have. We attract students from a variety of places–some from small liberal arts schools like Millsaps, especially schools across the South. And we get students from big public institutions like the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia. We have had students from Berkeley and Stanford and places like that. When you scratch very deep, you find out that even though they went to school there, they grew up in the South or their parents grew up in the South or they visited grandparents in the South, which made a huge impression. They come from a good variety of programs and from a good variety of disciplines. Mostly they come from history and English, but we always have some from art or music, sociology, anthropology, and other areas.

   GWW: When we began the programs, both the B.A. and the M.A., some people asked questions like “What in the world is somebody going to do after he or she graduates from such a program?” And you have probably heard the same kinds of questions about American Studies programs. How has that turned out for our graduates? Have they been able to gain employment if that is what they want to do?

   CRW: They have. Not everyone gets the ideal job, of course, but it is a program that prepares you for two different things. Some of our students are on a track to do further graduate work, and often in American Studies that is the next step toward entering a doctoral program. We have had our students go on to the University of Texas in American Studies (we have had several students go there), to Emory University, the University of North Carolina, the University of Georgia, the University of Florida, Brown University, and others. The second track has been students who go out and do cultural work, whether it is working in museums or galleries or research centers like the Southern Regional Council or the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have three students working for Southern Living magazine as writers. We have one who is at CNN in Atlanta. We have several who have gone into high school teaching, some who have started businesses.

   GWW: You mentioned the kinds of things you have to do as director. During a given year, what percentage of your time is devoted to fund raising?

   CRW: Not enough! It seems like we always need funds. Probably 20 percent.

   GWW: What are some of the things you do that you could not do if you had no outside funding?

   CRW: A lot of the conferences--for example, the Oxford Conference for the Book. We raise all of the money, basically now, from grants we get or Friends of the Center donations. Our newsletter, the Southern Register, which goes to more than 30,000 people, is basically supported by outside funds. A lot of our graduate stipends require external funding; last year we spent $30,000 of donated funds or grants on those.

   GWW: It has been frustrating, I know, but through the years once or twice we have been able to pick up with hard money some of the things the Center is doing with soft money. If you were to get additional state money, what would you do with it? Would it be to support the things you just mentioned–the conference, the newsletter, graduate students?

   CRW: Yes, it might be in terms of outreach position we work with raising funds. The biggest problem with outside funding is being able to predict when you are going to get it and do good planning. Our goal is to secure some of those projects.

   GWW: We were very fortunate in having a really big donation that allowed us to hire two new people. Do you still need more faculty? 

   CRW: We do need more faculty. The addition of those two McMullan professors was terrific, very important in our curriculum. We don’t have anyone now who really teaches in Southern music or anyone who teaches in Southern art, key areas of Southern culture. We do need more faculty to make sure we can offer a curriculum that really covers Southern culture the way we want to.

   GWW: I know you have to run take care of one of those administrative chores in a minute [talking with prospective students], but let me ask you, though, what you see for both short- and long-range plans for the Center.