Faculty members honored during the spring faculty meeting for the College of Liberal Arts include (from left) Ted Ownby, winner of the college’s Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement; Eden Tanner, recipient of a campuswide Frist Student Service Award; Saumen Chakraborty, Edmonds New Scholar Award; Jared Delcamp, Melinda and Ben Yarbrough Senior Award for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics; Emily Bretherick Rowland, Outstanding Instructor of the Year Award; Jacqueline Frost DiBiasie-Sammons, Cora Lee Graham Award for Outstanding Teaching of Freshmen; Carrie Smith, Edmonds New Scholar Award; and Timothy Yenter, Howell Family Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. Photo by Kevin Bain/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services

Eight University of Mississippi professors have been honored by the College of Liberal Arts for their excellence in teaching and research, including History’s own Ted Ownby.

A nomination letter for Ownby states, “(He) has distinguished himself as one of the most productive and pioneering scholars in both the History Department and in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. (His) impact on the lives of students at both the graduate and undergraduate level is broad and lasting.

“But more striking is the tone of deep affection and regard his former students use in describing their relationship, which in many cases extends far beyond the UM campus and into their professional lives.”

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Professor Works to Make Theologian’s Historical Records Accessible

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Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies has awarded fellowships to six University of Mississippi faculty members for their academic research related to gender and sexuality, including the History Department’s own Dr. Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson.

Lindgren-Gibson, assistant professor of history, said she’ll be exploring the history of friendship in the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries and is planning a research trip to archives in the United Kingdom this summer.

She hopes to find a few letter collections that can form the basis of an article and eventually a book proposal.

“My research is driven by two big questions: How did people live their lives in the past, and how have the stories of those lives been obscured for us in the present?” she said.

Lindgren-Gibson said she became interested in this research when she found a collection of papers in the British Library from an Afghan woman, Mermanjan, who married a British officer in the 1840s.

“The collection was totally fascinating – you could see her learning how to write in English, she made sketches of the new community she was a part of – so there are lots of images of women in massive petticoats and men in top hats; she and her husband would sketch together, and she kept scrapbooks.

“But I was also interested in how these papers came to the archive in the first place. They weren’t donated by Mermanjan’s family – which is the usual route – but they were donated by one of her friends to whom Mermanjan had left the papers when she died. And this friend made Mermanjan’s story part of her own family history – even though they weren’t related.

“I started to think about how friendship can shape histories and the way we remember and preserve the past. Friendships are powerful parts of almost everyone’s life, but our archives aren’t set up to preserve the histories of those ties.”

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