Leader in Southern studies Bill Ferris to speak at ̫ӳ March 21
Contact: Allison Matthews
STARKVILLE, Miss.—A nationally recognized leader in Southern studies, African American music and folklore visits Mississippi State later this month.
Vicksburg native William R. “Bill” Ferris will serve March 20-22 as a 2016 ̫ӳ Scholar-in-Residence. While on campus, he will be meeting with students and faculty members, as well as making a major address March 21 in the McComas Hall auditorium that is free and open to all.
“The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists” will be the topic of his 6 p.m. presentation. A book signing follows. Ferris’ 2013 book with the same title was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2013.
A University of Pennsylvania doctoral graduate, he is a former chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities. He also co-authored the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” (UNC Press, 1989), a major reference linking popular, folk and academic cultures.
Currently, Ferris is senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he also is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore.
Ferris was founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he was a faculty member for 18 years.
He has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most dealing with African American music and folklore representing the Mississippi Delta.
Ferris’ Mississippi State visit is sponsored by the university’s Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures, communication, English, history, political science and public administration, and sociology, as well as African American Studies and Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures.
For more information, contact Leslie Hossfeld, professor and head of the sociology department, at lh401@msstate.edu.
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