Why Study the South? Southern Studies in the 21st Century

Director John Grammer discusses his vision for Southern Studies at Sewanee

Director John Grammer
Director John Grammer
University Library's Fourth Annual Tom Watson Memorial Lecture

About

The Center for Southern Studies at the University of the South is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is committed to rigorous explorations of the Southern past, confronting the region's moral and practical failures as well as its achievements, in the hopes of informing a thoughtful critique of the present and an imagining of possible futures. The goal of the program is to encourage the interdisciplinary study of the U.S. South by the scholars who participate in its conferences and other academic occasions, by the post-doctoral Fellows it hosts, and by undergraduates at the University of the South.

Features

Recent Event: Lecture - "Spinoza in the South: Notes Toward an Understanding of Christian Gottlieb Priber's Place in Western Intellectual History"

On Thursday, February 1, at 4:30 p.m. in Naylor Auditorium, award-winning writer John Jeremiah Sullivan gave a lecture entitled "Spinoza in the South: Notes Toward an Understanding of Christian Gottlieb Priber's Place in Western Intellectual History." The talk is sponsored by the Mellon-funded Center for Southern Studies, the Roberson Project, the University Lectures Committee, The Sewanee Review, The Sewanee School of Letters, and the English Department.

Project: Locating Slavery's Legacies Database

The Locating Slavery's Legacies database (LSLdb) collects information about monuments and memorials linked to slavery, the American Civil War, and the Confederacy on American college campuses. The LSLdb is produced by research teams of instructors and students on campuses across the region. As it grows, this public resource will shed light on the interplay of Lost Cause movements and higher education in the 160 years after emancipation. The database also includes memorials erected in opposition to the Lost Cause and white supremacy and in support of racial equality and universal Civil Rights.

Explore the Database
Faculty: Susanna Weygandt

Explore the digital exhibit of final projects for "Humanities 215: Introduction to Digital Humanities Through Post-Soviet Identity and America's South," a Spring 2022 course led by Dr. Susanna Weygandt, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian. For their final project, students wrote research essays based on an aspect of the readings that excited them and used visualizations to support their arguments. They displayed their chosen visualizations in a digital exhibit of historical images in Omeka S to highlight connections between US slavery and Russian serfdom.

Learn More

Call for Faculty Proposals for Research or Course Development

Thanks to its Mellon Grant, Southern Studies is able to offer financial support for faculty research or course development relevant to the study of the U.S. South.

  • Course development proposals should identify the subject matter of the course, the primary department in which it would be offered, and an explanation of the work to be done in preparing it. We particularly welcome proposals for “linked courses,” pairs of courses, offered by two different faculty members in two different departments, that will complement one another in the experience of students who register for both.
  • Research proposals should identify the project to be developed, its current stage of development, and plans for work during the grant period.
  • For both course-development and research grants, please keep in mind the possibilities afforded by the tools of Digital Humanities such as Scalar, Omeka, or Tableau. Interested faculty, whether applying for financial support or not, may consult with the program’s digital humanities specialist, Hannah Huber.

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