On May 15, 2020, Instructional Associate Professor Robert Fleegler published the piece below in the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post.
“If President Trump loses in 2020, it won’t be because of Joe Biden”
By Robert Fleegler
May 15, 2020
AUGUST 31, 2020 BY KATHRYN ALBRITTON
Frances Kneupper, associate professor in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History at the University of Mississippi, has been honored as a 2020-21 senior fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Central European University.
Founded in 2011 in Budapest, Hungary, the institute promotes scholarly research in the context of an intellectual interdisciplinary community. It annually grants up to 30 fellowships to scholars from around the world focusing on social sciences, humanities, law and art.
Kneupper, a cultural historian of religion whose research focuses on heresy, prophecy and religious dissent in the Holy Roman Empire, is scheduled to leave for Budapest in October. The first senior fellow at the institute from Ole Miss will work on her second book project, “Beware of False Prophets: The Contest over Prophecy in the Late Middle Ages.”
“Beware of False Prophets” examines how several groups of Medieval women in Europe declared themselves prophets – a phenomenon typically limited to the realm of men – and were fiercely opposed by their male contemporaries.
“This was an argument about whether women should have a voice and authority,” Kneupper said. “You can see the same dynamics still being played out today when women try to claim power in a male-dominated sphere. This is a universal issue.”
Her other scholarly works include “The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval Germany Prophecy” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and a digital textbook, “Foundations of Western Culture Through 1500” (Great River Learning, 2015).
“Frances is an innovative researcher and well-known interpreter of the Medieval world for both lay and academic audiences,” said Noell Wilson, UM associate professor and chair of history. “She is respected for her scholarship and teaching alike.
“We are thrilled that she has this next year to complete her current book project while also cultivating intellectual bridges with historians in Budapest and Europe more broadly.”
Garrett Felber
AUGUST 14, 2020 BY KATHRYN ALBRITTON
A University of Mississippi history professor is set to begin a one-year fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in September.
Garrett Felber, assistant professor of history at UM, is among just 16 chosen fellows this year. Founded in 1975, the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute annually grants up to 20 scholars from across the world to perform individual research at either the predoctoral or postdoctoral level into an array of topics related to African and African American studies.
Felber will spend the year working on two book projects: “We Are All Political Prisoners: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre” and “The Norfolk Plan: The Community Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Both works will focus on different aspects of Felber’s primary research topic: 20th-century African American social movements, Black radicalism and efforts to reform or abolish prisons.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Felber will be working remotely from Oregon.
“This fellowship will allow me the time to work on two important projects that I hope will advance the understanding not only of the specific topics, but of the relationship between Black people in America and the carceral state,” Felber said.
Felber is the author of “Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State” (UNC Press, 2020) and co-author of “The Portable Malcolm X Reader” with the late Manning Marable (Penguin Classics, 2013). Felber’s work has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History and Souls.
He also served as lead organizer for the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference and is project director of the Parchman Oral History Project, a collaborative oral history, archival and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. He co-founded Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons, and spearheaded the Prison Abolitionist Syllabus, a reading list published by Black Perspectives that highlighted and contextualized the prison strikes of 2016 and 2018.
Felber not only researches and writes about prisons; he teaches in them. In Mississippi, he has taught two classes at Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs.
“Garrett is an indefatigable researcher and community builder whose knowledge of the carceral state stems not merely from archival digging, but also from his volunteer engagement with prisons as a teacher,” said Noell Wilson, professor and chair of the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History.
“We are thrilled with this award because it both recognizes his national profile in the field of African American history and provides critical space for him to advance two pioneering interpretive projects.”
Congrats to Professor Paul Polgar, one of the three finalists for the 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize, which honors the best notification book on the slave trade, slavery & anti-slavery in the Atlantic World. The winner will be announced in November 2020.
We, the undersigned historians of the University of Mississippi, join our colleagues in American history in repudiating the plans to renovate the university cemetery as part of the Confederate monument relocation. We agree that the University must explicitly renounce the white supremacist ideology that the monument represents. The proposed plans for the cemetery perpetuate this ideology.
In keeping with the assessment of our late colleague, John Neff, a scholar of memory and commemoration in the Civil War, we particularly reject the placement of headstones at the Confederate cemetery. We support our colleagues’ statement of June 22, 2020, share their opposition to the redevelopment of the cemetery, and demand the immediate release of all records concerning the University’s decision-making process on these matters.
Signed,
Jesse Cromwell
Chiarella Esposito
Lester L. Field
Joshua First
Joshua Howard
Vivian Ibrahim
Zachary Kagan Guthrie
Frances Kneupper
Marc H. Lerner
Theresa Levitt
Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson
Mohammed Bashir Salau
Isaac Stephens
Peter Thilly
Nicolas Trepanier
Jeffrey R. Watt
Noell Wilson
OXFORD, Miss. – After Ted Ownby stepped down as the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in 2019, he wanted to do something different, so he decided to apply for a Fulbright Award.
To his delight, he received word that he will be the Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, which combines research and teaching and is the most prestigious Fulbright grant in Denmark.
Ownby, the UM William Winter Professor of History and professor of Southern studies, made his decision after attending the Southern Studies Forum in Denmark last year.
“The Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark is a lively group with several scholars interested in the American South, and the university is an attractive place; I remember walking trails, bicycles and lots of birds,” Ownby said.
“The city of Odense is Denmark’s third-largest city, famous among other things as the home of Hans Christian Andersen, and I look forward to getting to know it. I’ll teach in English, but I’m slowly and awkwardly learning some Danish.”
He will teach one class to either graduate or upper-level undergraduates with class sizes of approximately 25-45 students. He also will give at least one public lecture at the University of Southern Denmark, attend faculty meetings, talk to faculty and students, and be available to travel to other European universities.
Katie McKee, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, has been a colleague of Ownby for many years.
“This Fulbright is a tremendous opportunity for Dr. Ownby, a well-deserved chance for adventure after many years of serving as center director and a real testament to the excellence of his scholarship,” McKee said.
The award was intended for the 2020-21 academic year, but the COVID-19 pandemic shortened the stay to the spring semester only, which begins in January 2021. Coincidentally, robotics researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have developed the world’s first fully automatic robot capable of carrying out throat swabs for COVID-19, so that healthcare professionals are not exposed to the risk of infection.
“I proposed two classes when I thought I would be there for two semesters: one on my current book project on ideas about innocence in 20th-century Mississippi and the other a broader class on recent scholarship in Southern history,” Ownby said.
“Now the plan is either to teach the class about Mississippi, or maybe to team teach with a couple of colleagues in Denmark. Of course, it’s hard to plan right now, because it’s possible that health conditions won’t allow international travel.”
January should be an especially intriguing time to be teaching about the U.S. because classes will begin just a few days after the presidential inauguration.
“That election, no matter what I’m teaching about, will likely be a starting point for some good discussions,” Ownby said. “More broadly, teaching U.S. history outside the U.S. is always useful – I saw this teaching in the Fulbright program in Italy almost 30 years ago – because it makes faculty think about the questions we start with and encourages us to think about making comparisons we might not have considered.”
Colleagues in the history department are especially thrilled with Ownby’s award, said Noell Wilson, chair of history and Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies.
“It reveals the global profile of our faculty, even those who work primarily on U.S. history and not necessarily (on) international topics,” Wilson said. “We are constantly looking to build intellectual bridges with colleagues in Europe and beyond and are grateful to Ted for sharing his expertise with scholars and students in Denmark to establish collaborations in Scandinavia.”
Both the Danish and U.S. governments financially support this program. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program offers approximately some 470 teaching, research or combination teaching/research awards in more than 125 countries.
Opportunities are available for college and university faculty and administrators as well as for professionals, artists, journalists, scientists, lawyers, independent scholars and many others. Besides several new program models designed to meet the changing needs of U.S. academics and professionals, Fulbright offers flexible awards including multicountry opportunities.
On June 22, 2020, the Americanist faculty in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History released a statement in response to recently obtained plans created by the University of Mississippi and approved by the Institutions of Higher Learning Board for the relocation of the Confederate monument on campus.
June 22, 2020
We, the undersigned American historians working at the University of Mississippi, strongly oppose the recently released plans to renovate and add headstones to the Civil War cemetery on campus as part of the relocation of the Confederate monument. Ideally, we believe this monument should be removed from campus entirely, given its explicitly white supremacist origins. But if it remains on campus, it should not be glorified and the university should make it clear that it rejects the racist and hateful ideology this monument represents.
We oppose the renovation of the cemetery and the addition of headstones because:
As historians, we know that monuments reflect the values of the people who erect them. To glorify the cemetery and the relocated Confederate monument in the ahistorical ways the university has proposed is to build a new Confederate monument in 2020, effectively reenacting the injustice that white supremacists committed when they erected it in 1906. In doing so, the university will create a new destination for neoconfederate and other extremist groups on campus, not only violating its stated values, but also jeopardizing the peace and safety of its students, faculty, and staff. We urge the university to leave the cemetery as it currently is. Further, to begin to repair the breach of trust with campus constituents that the university has committed during this episode, we demand that the university immediately make public all records of its deliberations and decision-making regarding the plans for the relocation of the Confederate monument and the redevelopment of the cemetery.
Signed,
Mikaela M. Adams, Associate Professor of History
Garrett Felber, Assistant Professor of History
Darren E. Grem, Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies
Shennette Garrett-Scott, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies
April Holm, Associate Professor of History and Interim Director, Center for Civil War Research
Rebecca K. Marchiel, Assistant Professor of History
Ted Ownby, Professor of History and Southern Studies
Eva Payne, Assistant Professor of History
Paul J. Polgar, Assistant Professor of History
Jarod Roll, Associate Professor of History
Charles Ross, Professor of History and African-American Studies
Susan Gaunt Stearns, Assistant Professor of History
Anne Twitty, Associate Professor of History
Jessica Wilkerson, Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies
The 2020 Franklin L. Riley Prize for the best undergraduate paper has been awarded to Jessica Flach for “A Fate Worse than Death: The Threat of Rape During the Civil War and the Southern White Woman’s Response.”
In her paper, which was produced in a history capstone seminar taught by Professor April Holm, Flach explains how the threat of rape was employed both by Union and Confederate soldiers in an attempt to control the behavior of white southern women during the Civil War. Using personal diaries, Flach demonstrates that these threats did not always have their intended effect. Some women responded by defying orders from both northern and southern men.
The 2020 John W. Odom Memorial Prize in Southern History has been awarded to Matthew Powell for “How the Mighty Fell: The Decline of Generational Wealth among the Planter Elite Families of Desoto County, Mississippi, 1836-1870.” The Odom Prize is given to the best undergraduate or graduate paper on southern history.
Powell’s paper, which was written in a capstone seminar taught by Professor Anne Twitty, examines the decline of intergenerational wealth among DeSoto County’s planter elite as a result of Confederate defeat and emancipation. Specifically, he selected four DeSoto County slaveholding families—each of whom had sent at least one son to be educated at the University of Mississippi during the 1850s and then serve the Confederacy during the 1860s—and traced their financial fortunes from the county’s founding in 1836 to the midst of Reconstruction in 1870. In the end, using census, military, and University records, Powell was able to show, in a particularly concrete fashion, just how economically devastating the decision to secede was for some of the South’s wealthiest residents.
Powell, an Olive Branch native, graduated with his B.A. in history in May 2020. During his undergraduate career, he spent summers working as a park ranger at Shiloh National Military Park and Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area in Fort Smith, Montana. He has earned a full scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in history at Northern Arizona University.
