Over 70 University of Mississippi faculty and graduate students shared their research on race and ethnicity in a Feb. 27 forum.

This event began with breakfast at 8:30 a.m., and the first panel began at 9 a.m. in the Butler Auditorium of the Triplett Alumni Center. The goal of the forum was to bring UM faculty and graduate students together as a community to learn about and discuss research on race and ethnicity that’s being done at UM.

“With over a total of 25 submissions, we got an overwhelming response to the call for proposals,” said Simone Delerme, McMullan associate professor of anthropology and Southern Studies. Delerme is coordinating the event alongside Marcos Mendoza, associate professor of anthropology, and Catarina Passidomo, Southern Foodways Alliance associate professor of Southern Studies and anthropology.

“We have graduate students and faculty representing the law school; (departments of) Sociology, Southern Studies, History, Leadership and Counselor Education, English, Social Work, and Modern Languages; the Center for Community Engagement; and the School of Journalism and New Media. We were really excited to receive some proposals from very impressive folks from units that didn’t present last year.”

History Department had three students that presented:

• Scott Blusiewicz, doctoral candidate in history, “Crafting a Legacy: Politics and Memory in Ralph David Abernathy’s Autobiography”
• Travis Patterson, doctoral candidate in history, “Claude Neal and the Fight for Antilynching Legislation, 1934-1950”
• Brianna Taylor, master’s degree student in history, “The American Civil War Viewed Through a Different Lens: Print Culture and the American Perception of the Mexican Reform War”

The forum is organized by the Study of Race and Racism Exploration Group, a working group of faculty seeking to found a Center for the Study of Race and Racism on campus. Co-sponsors include the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Graduate School, Department of History, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, College of Liberal Arts, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Department of Social Work.

On Monday, February 27th, Dr. Peter Lake from Vanderbilt will give a guest lecture at 5 pm in Barnard 105. The lecture is titled “Memory, Identity, and the English Revolution: Samuel Clarke and his Lives.” Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Lecture Series. Organized by history faculty Dr. Isaac Stephens.

Dr. Lake is a Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Peter Lake works on post-Reformation English History (mostly in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods and in the realms of religion, politics and culture). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy. In 2010-2011 he gave the Ford Lectures in Oxford. He has written twelve books; (co-authored with Richard Cust) Gentry politics and the politics of religion: Cheshire on the eve of civil war (Manchester University Press, 2020;); (co-authored with Michael Questier) All hail to the Archpriest (Oxford University Press,  2019, Hamlet’s choice: religion and resistance in Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies (Yale University Press, 2020)  How Shakespeare put politics on the stage (Yale University Press, 2016) Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 2015); (co-authored with Isaac Stephens)   Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (The Boydell Press, 2015); (co-authored with Michael Questier) The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011; 2nd revised edition MacMillan, 2019), (also with Michael Questier) The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (Yale University Press, 2002); (Stanford University Press, 2001), Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Throught from Whitgift to Hooker (Unwin Hyman, 1988) and Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge University Press, 1982). He is also co-editor of six collections of essays. His book On Laudianism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on several projects; with Michael Questier,  on a study of Catholic life writing in the post reformation; a book about the origins of the puritan godly life in the period down to 1640, and a book, provisionally entitled Memory, identity and the experience of revolution; Samuel Clarke and the invention of ‘puritanism’, about Samuel Clarke’s collections of godly lives; and a study of the Moretons of Moreton Hall, a Cheshire gentry family of no great apparent importance, but of very considerable interest, at least to him.

On Wednesday, February 22, Dr. Hilary Falb Kalisman will give a guest lecture in Bryant 207 at 5:30. The lecture is titled “Reading, Writing, Revolution? Teachers and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Co-sponsored by the Department of Teacher Education, University Lecture Series, University of Mississippi Hillel, and the Oxford Jewish Federation. Organized by history professor Dr. Marc Lerner.

Dr. Kalisman is a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder and  teaches courses on Jewish, Middle Eastern, and transnational history including “Introduction to Jewish History Since 1492” and “Modern Childhood in Israel/Palestine.”

Professor Kalisman holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include education, colonialism, state and nation building in Israel/Palestine as well as in the broader Middle East. Her current book manuscript, “Schooling the State: Education in the Modern Middle East” uses a collective biography of thousands of public school teachers across Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan/Jordan to trace how the arc of teachers’ professionalization correlated with their political activity, while undermining correspondence between nations, nationalism and governments across the region. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Education, the American Academic Institute in Iraq as well as the International Institute of Education, among other organizations. She has recently begun a new project analyzing the history of standardized testing in Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. For the 2019-2020 academic year she is also a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Initiative, part of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

University of Mississippi professors, students, and alumni will be recognized at the 34th annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration on February 23–24.

Latrice Johnson, an English and gender studies master’s student, and Eva Payne, an assistant professor of history, are UM’s selected 2023 William Winter Scholars for what has been called “Mississippi’s most significant annual conference devoted to literature, history, film, and culture.”

Jodi Skipper, associate professor of anthropology and Southern Studies, is one of the country’s eminent writers and scholars featured on the Natchez program.

Payne, an historian of the 19th- and 20th-century United States with a focus on gender and sexuality, codirects Invisible Histories—Mississippi, a Mellon Foundation-funded project documenting and preserving the state’s LGBTQ+ history through oral histories and archival collecting.

“I’m honored to be named one of this year’s William Winter Scholars for the 34th Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration,” said Payne, who joined UM’s faculty in 2017 after a Loeb Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. “The program is full of fascinating scholars, writers, and filmmakers, and I’m particularly excited to attend my UM colleague Dr. Jodi Skipper’s panel.”

Each year Mississippi students and faculty are chosen to be William Winter Scholars at the conference in honor of the late Governor from 1980 to 1984. Known as the “Education Governor of Mississippi,” UM alumnus Winter (BA history and political science 43, LLB 49) served as the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration Director of Proceedings from its founding in 1990 through 2017.

Donald Dyer, associate dean for faculty and academic affairs for the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Artsand distinguished professor of modern languages, encourages faculty, staff, and alumni to join the UM representatives at the event.

“This year’s Natchez Celebration looks to be, once again, an exciting and important gathering of students, faculty and scholars interested in literature, history and film. The College of Liberal Arts is proud to send Dr. Payne and Ms. Johnson as representatives from our university,” Dyer said. “They were selected enthusiastically by a committee of faculty and staff to participate in the conference.”

Free and open to the public, the event at the Natchez Convention Center is cosponsored by Copiah-Lincoln Community College and the City of Natchez, Adams County Board of Supervisors, Visit Natchez, Mississippi Arts Commission, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi Humanities Council, National Park Service, and the generous contributions of individuals and businesses throughout the state and region.

Click here for full article.

Queer Mississippi on Display at J.D. Williams Library

Graduate students gather, curate LGBTQ+ materials for exhibition

Eva Payne (center), UM associate professor of history, speaks with Madeline Burdine (left), a first-year graduate sociology and anthropology student, and Angie Rankin, a second-year sociology graduate student, about their display for the Queer Mississippi Exhibit in the Department of Archives and Special Collections in the J.D. Williams Library. The exhibit uses university archival materials and quotes from the Queer Mississippi Oral History project to show the history of LGBTQ+ people in the state. Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services

DECEMBER 7, 2022 BY CLARA TURNAGE

Eleven University of Mississippi graduate students (including History PhD student Paul Mora) have curated an exhibition of LGBTQ+ Mississippi materials as a part of a multidisciplinary study on the history of the queer South.

Amy McDowell, associate professor of sociology, and Eva Payne, assistant professor of history, are leading the cross-listed course Queer Mississippi, in which students study and exhibit evidence of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities in the state.

The exhibit, which is on display in the Department of Archives and Special Collections of the J.D. Williams Library through January, is divided into three topics:

• religion and queerness
• visibility and signaling
• mapping queer spaces in the South

For the full article, click here.