Jon Parrish Peede is Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His previous positions include publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) at the University of Virginia, literature grants director at the National Endowment for the Arts, counselor to NEA Chairman Dana … Read more

“Storytellers and Sociopaths: Thoughts on How We Define Reality from Post-Obama Appalachia” This lecture will explore connections between the rich storytelling tradition, grinding economic challenges, hard political choices, despair, and hope experienced by people in the southeast Kentucky coalfields. Gipe … Read more

“What is the real basis of a public enterprise?” The Cherokee Nation and the Social Safety Net In this lecture, Reed will discuss why nineteenth-century Cherokee people chose to surrender aspects of their holistic system of care for others rooted … Read more

In this lecture, titled “The Beekeeper: Collecting Oral Histories of Black Southern Queer Women,” Johnson discussed some methodological challenges of being a man conducting research on women as well as addressing some topics that he found to be common among … Read more

“Free-Market Activists and School Desegregation” Suppose that something long understood as an ending was really a beginning. What if the white South’s massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision proved to be not just the … Read more