Summersell Center for the Study of the South

Summersell Center Announces Recipients of 2013 Short-Term Fellows

jrothman — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:53:16 +0000

The Summersell Center for the Study of the South is pleased to announce that the following individuals have been awarded short-term research fellowships for work to be conducted in the libraries and collections of the University of Alabama during the upcoming calendar year:

L. Bao Bui, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: “‘I Feel Impelled to Write’: Social Networking and the Culture of Letter Writing during the Civil War”

Jennifer D. Jones, Princeton University, “‘To Resort More Easily to Sexual Perversion’: Homosexuality and the Politics of Racial Empowerment in the South, 1940-1970″

Robert C. Poister, University of Georgia: “Dinner at the Hotel Cubano: Reinterpreting the Lives and Legacies of Confederate Exiles in the American Sugar Kingdom”

John P. Riley, Binghamton University: “Adjoining Spheres: Fatherhood and the Family in Victorian America”

Lincoln Prize Winner James Oakes, on the Emancipation Proclamation

jrothman — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:22:21 +0000

Join the Summersell Center on Thursday, April 11, 2013, when James Oakes will be offering a talk entitled “The Emancipation Proclamation: Myths and Realities,” in commemoration of the proclamation’s 150th anniversary. Professor Oakes is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, and is a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize, including for his most recent book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. His talk will take place in Smith Hall 205 on the University of Alabama campus at 5:30, and will be followed by a small reception and a book signing.

Summersell lectures and events now available on itunes

jrothman — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:16:49 +0000

The Summersell Center is happy to announce that it now has its own section on the University of Alabama’s itunesU channel. Using itunes, connect to itunesU, locate the University’s channel, and you can begin watching or hearing talks, presentations, and other Summersell events that you either missed or that were so spectacular that you want to revisit them again and again! Keep coming back. We’ll be adding new content as it becomes available.

“Where We Stand: A One-Day Conference”

jrothman — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:08:35 +0000

Please join the Summersell Center on April 5, 2013, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” with a one-day conference. Gathering scholars doing some of the best new work on the history of the civil rights movement and the racial integration and culminating with a keynote address by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter on the site of the Stand itself, this promises to be among the most exciting events the Summersell Center has sponsored yet. This event is free and open to the public. Panels will be held at 9:30 am and 1:30 pm in the AIME Building Room 110 on the University of Alabama campus. The keynote address, at which Ms. McWhorter will be introduced by Peggy Wallace Kennedy, will take place at 5:15 on the Malone-Hood Plaza at Foster Auditorium.

Lila Weaver on “South Americans in the American South”

jrothman — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:04:38 +0000

Please join the Summersell Center on March 14 at 5 pm in Room 110 of the AIME Building on the University of Alabama campus, where Lila Quintero Weaver will present “South Americans in the American South: A Memoir.” Ms. Weaver is the author of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, a graphic novel about growing up the child of immigrants from South America in the segregated/civil rights era American South. Darkroom is a truly stunning piece of work, and hearing the author speak ought not to be missed. Books will be available for purchase at a small reception to follow the talk.

Natalie Ring on the “Problem South”

jrothman — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:51:02 +0000

On February 25, 2013, Natalie Ring, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas-Dallas and author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930, will be speaking on “The U.S. South as a National and Global Problem.” The talk will begin at 5:30 pm in the Summersell Room on the second floor of ten Hoor Hall on the University of Alabama campus, and will be followed by a small dinner reception. This event is free and open to the public, but the Summersell Center requests an RSVP by February 20 to jrothman@bama.ua.edu.

Summersell Center Announces 2013 Short-Term Fellowship Program

jrothman — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:11:19 +0000

To support the study of southern history and promote the use of the collections housed at the University of Alabama, the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South will offer four fellowships in the amount of $500 each for researchers whose projects entail work to be conducted in southern history or southern studies at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library (http://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/hoole/), the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection (http://www.lib.ua.edu/williamscollection), or in other University of Alabama collections.

Applicants should send two copies of:

A current CV
One letter of recommendation (which may be sent under separate cover)
A description of the research project, no longer than two double-spaced pages, which includes a description of the particular resources to be used during the term of the fellowship

The deadline for applications to be received by the Summersell Center is March 22, 2013. Decisions regarding awards will be made by May 1, 2013, and research may be conducted anytime between June 1, 2013 and May 31, 2014. Both academic and non-academic researchers at any stage of their careers are encouraged to apply. Because fellowships are designed primarily to help defray travel and lodging expenses, however, eligibility is restricted to researchers living outside the Tuscaloosa area.

Send all application materials to:

Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South
Department of History
University of Alabama
Box 870212
202 ten Hoor Hall
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487

Any questions about the fellowships may be directed to Joshua Rothman, Director of the Summersell Center, at jrothman@bama.ua.edu or 205.348.3818.

Andrew Torget on History in the Digital Age

jrothman — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:09:07 +0000

On February 11, 2013, Andrew Torget will speak on “The Promise and Perils of Doing History in the Digital Age.” As we consider what will become of the humanities in the age of Google, Torget, a faculty fellow and director of the Digital History Lab at the University of North Texas, will talk about the unprecedented challenges and opportunities that face historians in the twenty-first century. Tracing the evolution of the digital humanities over the past two decades, he will explore how new research methods (such as geospatial analysis and text-mining) are creating a quiet revolution among historians, and what that could mean for how we understand the past. This event is free and open to the public, and will be held at 3 pm in Gorgas Library, Room 205.

Preston Lauterbach to speak on the Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock n’ Roll

jrothman — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:41:06 +0000

Please join the Summersell Center on November 14 at 4:30 in Lloyd Hall Room 324, where music journalist Preston Lauterbach will be speaking about his new book, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock n’ Roll, which details the story of the network of black nightclubs that blossomed in the 1930s and 1940s and gave rise to the music and many of the pioneering stars of early rock n’ roll.

This event is a rescheduling of a presentation originally planned for September.

Lauren Klein on Archival Silence, Digital Humanities, and James Hemings

jrothman — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:36:30 +0000

In spite of what Ed Folsom has extolled as the “epic transformation of archives,” the issue of archival silence–or gaps in the archival record–remains difficult to address. With the example of James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef (and Sally Hemings’s older brother), Lauren Klein will show how a set of techniques associated with the digital humanities–in particular, techniques that derive from the fields of computational linguistics and information visualization–can help to illuminate Hemings’s faint archival trace. In the course of narrating his life story, she will also show how the circumstances surrounding the record of Hemings’s life pose challenges to the current rhetoric of much digital humanities scholarship. As a critical stance so often framed in terms of epistemological “possibilities,” the digital humanities, when confronted with the unique demands of the archive of slavery, requires a rethinking of what it truly means to know.

Dr. Klein, who is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and director of Georgia Tech’s Digital Humanities Lab, will be making her presentation on November 7 at 4 pm in Lloyd Hall Room 324.