Contact: Robbie Ward
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A group of scholars from the United States and England will gather at Mississippi State University later this month to discuss Southern intellectual history.
Members of The Southern Intellectual History Circle, distinguished history professors from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, North Carolina, Michigan, and Virginia will visit the Starkville campus Feb. 22-24 for their annual meeting.
Individual sessions--all open to the general public--will be held either in the Leo Seal M-Club Building or Mitchell Memorial Library auditorium. The program schedule is available at http://www.missq.msstate.edu.
"Southern Intellectual History" is the general theme for the society's annual gatherings. Topics traditionally include the speeches and other ideological writings of intellectuals, Southern apologists and others about the Civil War, civil rights movement, and other pivotal events.
"They focus on writings about the Civil War and other historic times and movements that have defined Southern history," said MSU English professor Noel Polk. "They will discuss the intellectual atmosphere that drove aspects of Southern history."
Polk, a member of the society, is a nationally recognized scholar who also edits the Mississippi Quarterly, an English department-based journal of Southern culture.
W. Fitzhugh Brundage of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill will deliver the keynote address, "Revisiting the Southern Past: Memory, Religion and History," on the 22nd. He will speak at 7:30 p.m. in the M-Club Building, which is located at the south end of Davis Wade Stadium at Scott Field.
Brundage is the author of "The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory" (Harvard University Press, 2005), an examination of how Southern whites and blacks have struggled with meanings and uses of the region's past.
Along with Fitzhugh's lecture and discussion, the three-day program also will include presentations on "Women: Politics, Language and Time," "Memory, Race and Visual Culture" and roundtable discussions.
Alan Marcus, MSU history department head, said having the Southern Intellectual History Circle meeting on the Starkville campus will have mutual benefits for students, faculty and visiting academics.
"It's a way for our students to learn, but it's also a way for them to show a significant portion of the profession the excellent work that goes on here," Marcus said. "Having prominent scholars on campus is a win-win situation for everyone concerned and a vital aspect for professional development."
Michael O'Brien, a professor of American intellectual history at Jesus College in the University of Cambridge, founded the intellectual group in England in the late 1980s. Since then, sessions have met at locations from Cambridge to Sewanee, Tenn., to Cambridge, Mass., and to Chapel Hill, N.C., among others.
Although O'Brien will not lecture at the SCHC meeting, he will be featured as part of the MSU College of Arts and Science's Humanities Lecture Series at 4 p.m. Feb. 22 in the Swalm Chemical Engineering Building's Eastman Auditorium.
For more information, contact Polk at (662) 325-2407 or nep27@msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.