FEBRUARY 21: Kim Severson, New York Times Atlanta Bureau
MARCH 21: Cathy Ragland, University of North Texas
APRIL 11: Andrew Kahrl, Marquette University
KIM SEVERSON – Thurs., February 21, 2013
Hutchins Lecture with Kim Severson, Atlanta Bureau Chief, New York Times, “Talking About the South: A View from the Atlanta Bureau of the New York Times.” Introduced by Marcie Ferris, associate professor of American Studies and coordinator of the Southern Studies curriculum, UNC. The event will be held in the Kresge Foundation Common Room, 039 Graham Memorial Hall, adjacent to the Morehead Planetarium on East Franklin Street.
In 2010, Kim Severson became Atlanta bureau chief for the New York Times. Prior to this appointment, she was a feature writer for the paper’s “Dining and Wine” section. She spent six years writing about cooking and the culture of food for the San Francisco Chronicle. Before that, she worked for seven years as an editor and reporter at the Anchorage Daily News. Severson has covered crime, education, social services, and government for daily newspapers on the West Coast. As Atlanta bureau chief she has written broadly on topics about the American South, from the rich food cultures of the region, to the trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards, to the proposed legislation to compensate victims of sterilization in North Carolina, to racial violence in Mississippi. Her memoir, Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life, was published by Riverhead Books in 2010.
CATHY RAGLAND – Thurs., March 21, 2013
Hutchins Lecture with Cathy Ragland, associate professor of ethnomusicology, University of North Texas, “‘Orale Raza, here’s my brown soul’: The Mexican American Voice in American Popular Music.” Introduced by David Garcia, associate professor, Department of Music, UNC. The event will be held in the Kresge Foundation Common Room, 039 Graham Memorial Hall, adjacent to the Morehead Planetarium on East Franklin Street.
Dr. Ragland is an ethnomusicologist whose interests include music of the Borderlands, Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest, regional American and country music, Cuban popular music, traditional, and popular musics of Spain, North Africa, and the Balkans. Her book, Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation Between Nations, was published in May 2009 by Temple University Press. A native of San Antonio, where she was a popular music and arts critic for the San Antonio Express-News, she spent several years in Texas and elsewhere as a public folklorist. Her talk will explore the impact of Mexican American music styles such as Tex-Mex conjunto and norteña on American popular music.
ANDREW KAHRL – Thurs., April 11, 2013
Hutchins Lecture with Andrew Kahrl, assistant professor of history, Marquette University, “Racial Justice and Environmental Sustainability: Lessons from the Shore.” Introduced by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, UNC.
A scholar interested in the social, legal, and environmental history of beaches, coastal property, and waterfront real estate development in the United States, Dr. Kahrl examines how coastal areas both reflect and constitute relations of power, of tensions between human and environmental exploitation. His talk will trace the rise of southern beach resorts and coastal real estate from the perspective of the African American communities who once lived, worked, and played along these shores, and who have increasingly succumbed to the combined forces of man and nature. These ideas are more fully explored in his book The Land was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, published this spring by Harvard University Press. Among other accomplishments, he was a 2008-09 fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.
Photo credit: SeeBeeW (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).