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Mar 5

Dissertation Bootcamp at CSAS, March 10-14

dissertation bootcampAre you a UNC graduate student seeking a supportive environment to write your dissertation? Do you suffer from writer’s block, acute procrastination, or other dissertation-related afflictions?

If so, we invite you to take part in the first-ever “dissertation bootcamp” at the Center during the week of Spring Break. Participants will dedicate a block of time to writing each day. You’ll gain momentum on a project, make tangible progress, develop effective writing habits, and perform the often isolating task of “just writing” within a supportive community.

Graduate students who have begun the writing process will benefit the most. You should come prepared to produce and revise pages. Participation is free. We’ll meet Monday, March 10th through Friday, March 14th from 9:00 am–2:00 pm. Each session will include a half-hour break for lunch, discussion, and decompression.

Participants will have full access to the Center’s kitchen amenities (refrigerator, microwave, and coffee machine). Common areas can be used after the sessions for chatting, discussing work, and sharing writing. We regret that we can not provide free parking, but the Morehead Planetarium parking lot is two blocks away.

Space is limited, so spots in the bootcamp will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please RSVP to pathorn@unc.edu.

Feb 28

CSAS to Co-host IASPM Conference, Mar 13-16, 2014

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The Center for the Study of the American South, in collaboration with the Department of Music and the Southern Folklife Collection, is pleased to host the 2014 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (U.S. Branch).

The conference will focus on the theme “Music Flows,” in keeping with UNC’s campus-wide Water initiative. Most sessions and exhibits will occur in the buildings that house the Department of Music, with special events at the Center for the Study of the American South and Wilson Library’s Southern Folklife Collection. View the complete IASPM program here.

Feb 28

Hutchins Lecture by Jessica B. Harris, Thursday, March 20 at 4:30 pm

Jessica HarrisJessica B. Harris, Professor of English and Culinary History at Queens College/C.U.N.Y, will deliver her address, “Links in the Chains: Culinary Connectedness in the Atlantic World.“ Sponsored by the The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, the Institute of African American Research, and the Department of American Studies, this lecture will examine the cultural and culinary connections shared by the foodways of the African Atlantic World. This event will be held in the Kresge Foundation Room, 039 Graham Memorial Hall.

JHigh on the Hogessica B. Harris is the author of twelve cookbooks documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora. Her most recent, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, won the International Association of Culinary Professionals 2012 cookbook award for culinary history. Her other books include guidebooks to France and Paris and a book documenting the beauty secrets of women of color. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Harris has contributed to popular publications ranging from Essence to Saveur to German Vogue. Dr. Harris holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, Queens College, The Université de Nancy, and New York University.

Dr. Harris was the inaugural scholar in residence in the Ray Charles Chair in African-American Material Culture at Dillard University in New Orleans, where she established an Institute for the Study of Culinary Cultures. Dr. Harris is currently a professor at Queens College/C.U.N.Y. and is at work establishing an Institute for connecting culinary cultures. In 2012, she was asked by the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture to consult on the development of their new cafeteria.

Feb 28

SOHP 40th Anniversary Schedule

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Feb 28

Tell About the South: Bernie Herman, Wednesday, March 26 at 12:30 pm

Please join us at the Center for a discussion with Bernie Herman, who will share his comments on the art of Ronald Lockett, titled “Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die.” Lunch will be provided.

Civil Rights Marchers, by Ronald Lockett

Civil Rights Marchers (1988)
Image courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Ronald Lockett stands at the center of one of the most provocative and least understood American art movements. Defined neither by manifesto nor patronage or institution, Lockett’s art emanates from a cohesive, coherent movement united by creative practice and critical conversation articulated through the art itself. Words fail this movement, and historically words have limited and even endangered its presence and progress in contemporary artworlds. The creative practice that connects the art and artists of this movement takes shape in the appropriation and manipulation of “found”–often discarded or surplus–materials; its critical conversations unfold in deeply coded works produced in the long histories of struggle against systematic racial, economic, political, and institutional discrimination.

RLX-8

Ronald Lockett with April 19th (1995)
Image courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation

It is an art that has achieved its greatest, most intense florescence in the heart of the historically oppressive landscapes of the American South, but appears everywhere in the flows of the larger Southern diaspora of the twentieth century. The art of Ronald Lockett, largely unrecognized in conversations of the Contemporary, epitomizes what might be recognized as the Birmingham-Bessemer Movement in the visual and performing arts. In a movement manifest in a broader artistic practice, Lockett is joined by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, Mary Lee Bendolph, and others who make objects that range from monumental sculptures to patchwork quilts. Lockett’s art, too often marginalized through the language of folk, self-taught, and vernacular, transcends limiting artworld ideologies, speaking with affective and instructive power to themes of everyday life, spiritual concern, and the sweep of historical events.

Bernie Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, where he also serves on the Art History faculty. His books include Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper (2011), Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 (2005) and The Stolen House (1992). In 2011 he held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for a collection of essays, Troublesome Things in the Borderlands of Contemporary Art. His blog, Meditations on the Worlds of Things, reflects on ways of thinking about the textures of everyday life.

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