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Short-term Travel Fellowships for 2018-2019 Announced

The Summersell Center for the Study of the South and the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library of The University of Alabama are pleased to announce the recipients of short-term travel fellowships for 2018-2019. The winners are Dr. Sarah Gardner of Mercer University, who will be conducting research for her book, “A New Glass to See All Our Old Things Through”: Reading During the American Civil War, and Dr. Kathleen Hilliard of Iowa State University, who will be researching for […]

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Student Group Attends National Lynching Memorial Unveiling

Dr. Giggie and a group of students attended the recent opening of a national lynching memorial in Montgomery. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was founded by the Equal Justice Initiative on April 26th, 2018, in the heart of Alabama’s capital. While attending the unveiling ceremonies, Dr. Giggie and his students were able to meet Rev. C. T. Vivian, a minister deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement who worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Additionally, the […]

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PhD Candidate Melissa Young Awarded the 2018-2019 Rabbi Joachim Prinz Memorial Fellowship

PhD Candidate Melissa Young has recently been awarded the 2018-2019 Rabbi Joachim Prinz Memorial Fellowship. As part of her fellowship, Melissa will spend a month at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. She will conduct research for a chapter of her dissertation and share her work as part of an open AJA seminar in the summer. Melissa’s dissertation focuses on the important role Birmingham’s Jews played in the city’s development from 1871-1950. It […]

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Brie Smiley Accepted into Prestigious Research Apprenticeship

The Summersell Center is proud to announce that undergraduate Brie Smiley has been accepted into the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (MURAP) at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. MURAP is a program that targets underrepresented and minority undergraduate students who are interested in careers in academia. The program chooses twenty rising juniors and seniors every year, focusing on humanities students, to attend a ten week intensive research program. The application process is rigorous, but because of Brie’s […]

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Nominations for the 2018 Deep South Book Prize are now Being Accepted

The Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama continues to receive nominations for the 2018 Deep South Book Prize. Nominations will close on March 1, however. The prize is awarded biennially for the best book on the history or culture of the Deep South, and the author of the prizewinner will receive a cash award of $500. Books nominated for the next awarded prize must have been published between January 1, 2016 […]

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Summersell Center Sponsors Visit to EJI Offices in Montgomery

Students in Dr. Giggie’s HY 400 – Southern Memory: Lynching in Alabama course visited the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Alabama on October 18th as part of their work to better understand and encourage awareness of racial violence during the post-Reconstruction era in Alabama. The students, who are researching ten African-Americans lynched in Pickens County between 1883 and 1933, presented their findings to the officials at EJI. The students have been working in a variety of sources – newspapers, journals, census, wills, deeds, […]

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Mississippi State University Professor Jason Morgan War to Speak Thursday, Oct. 12, at 5 PM

The Summersell Center of the Study of the South and The University of Alabama Department of History will host Professor Jason Morgan Ward of Mississippi State University on Thursday, October 12, 2017, at 5 o’clock in room 30 ten Hoor Hall. Ward is the author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century (2016) and Defending White Democracy: The Making of the Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (2011). Ward’s talk is entitled, “Lifting the Veil: […]

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Summersell Center Helps UA Students tell the Stories of Tuscaloosa County Lynching Victims.

This article appeared originally on The University of Alabama’s Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility’s website. by Erin Mosley and Jamon Smith Dr. John Giggie describes the eras most Americans refer to as Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties as periods of racial terror for a significant portion of the country’s population. “At a time when the United States was in fact growing and prospering, many African-Americans feared for their lives,” says Giggie, associate professor of history and […]

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“Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South” Symposium to be held October 6.

Register today and plan to attend the one-day symposium, “Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South,” to be held Friday, October 6, 2017 at the Ferguson Center Great Hall on The University of Alabama’s campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Dixie’s Great War symposium, hosted by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, “is considered to be the largest conference in the country on World War I and the South,” says John Giggie, Associate Professor and Director […]

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Black/White Intimacies: Reimagining History, the South, and the Western Hemisphere

This two-day symposium explores interracial interactions and the forming of American culture during the antebellum period and beyond. We will address questions such as: What were the limitations of interracial intimacies and how might people have addressed those limitations in various settings – domestic spheres, legal systems, religious spaces, classrooms? If people across races and cultures lived, ate, slept, and traveled together, what were the implications for cultural understanding—or lack thereof? What was interracial intimacy and how might expressions of […]

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