Southern Studies Courses

Fall 2013

AFR/HIS 356 The Civil War and Reconstruction TR 9:25 Sarah Gardner
This course examines the Civil War and Reconstruction era through the lens of memoir. In addition to reading scholarship on the period, students will engage the post-war writings of combatants and non-combatants, Unionists and Confederates, the elite and ordinary folk. The class will pay particular attention to the conventions of the genre and the ways in which memoir shaped public memory of the war and its aftermath. This course is required for the Southern Studies major.

ENG 480S.001Neo Slave Narrative MWF 1:00PM David A. Davis  
Slavery is a persistent past, a set of memories rooted in the collective imagination of a race and nation that recur chronically. This course will use twentieth-century texts about slavery to explore the tangled web of history, memory, and imagination. Texts: Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada; William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose; Edward Jones, The Known World; and Toni Morrison, A Mercy. This course counts as an elective for the Southern Studies major.

Spring 2013

ENG 236 Southern Foodways
David Davis M W F 11:00 AM 11:50 AM WHM 102

HIS 363.001 African American History
Sarah Gardner T R 9:25 AM 10:40 AM LAN 301

Fall 2012

ENG 357 Cotton Kingdom: Labor and Sovereignty in the South
David Davis MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM WHM 102

HIS 361 The Old South
Sarah Gardner T R 9:25 AM 10:40 AM LAN 301

Spring 2012

ENG/SST 236.005 Civil War Memory
David Davis MWF 9:00 AM 9:50 AM WHM 102

ENG/AFR 359.001 African Amer Lit:to 1965
Chester Fontenot TR 1:40 PM 2:55 PM WHM 202

HIS 362.001 The New South
Doug Thompson TR 9:25 AM 10:40 AM LAN 301

Fall 2011

ENG 358.001 Poor White Southerners
David Davis MWF 1:00 PM 1:50 PM WHM 102

HIS 356.001 Civil War & Reconstruction
Sarah Gardner TR 9:25 AM 10:40 AM LAN 301

Spring 2011

HIS 363.001 African American History
Sarah Gardner TR 0925AM 1040AM LAN 301

ENG/SST 236.002 The Civil Rights Movement
David A. Davis MWF 0900AM 0950AM WHM 102

SST 480.001 Senior Seminar in Southern Studies
Doug Thompson TBA

Fall 2010

AFR 359.001 African American Literature to 1965
Chester Fontenot TR 1050AM 1205PM WHM 202

ENG 380.002 Southern Autobiography
David A. Davis MWF 0100PM 0150PM WHM 102

HIS 361.001 The Old South
Sarah Gardner TR 0925AM 1040AM LAN 301

Spring 2010

ENG 236.003 Southern Justice
David A. Davis MWF 0900AM 0950AM WHM 102

Until at least the recent past, the phrase "southern justice" has been an oxymoron. This course will examine the sociological, historical, and cultural aspects of the justice system in the South. Some topics we will discuss include dueling, convict leasing, chain gangs, lynching, prisons, and the death penalty.

HIS 362.001 The New South
Sarah Gardner TR 0925AM 1040AM LAN 301

This course explores the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history of one of the most fascinating regions in the nation - the American South. Historian David Potter has called the South “a kind of sphinx on the American land.”  It is unlikely that the class will solve the “riddle” of this American enigma.  But, as historians Paul Escott and David Goldfield have noted, “for all those who have endeavored to unlock its essence, the fun has been in the hunt and in the insights that come from . . . ‘the southern rage to explain.’”  This course covers the South from the end of Reconstruction to the present. To this end students will read major works by leading historians of the New South as well as primary documents. These materials will allow students to explore the writings of southerners, black and white, as well as the views of outsiders and interlopers, as they all rush to “tell about the South.”

SST 380.001 Religious Experience in the Antebellum South
Doug Thompson TR 1050AM 1205PM GRV 112

WGS 485.002 Southern Women in History, Literature, and Popular Culture
Sarah Gardner TR 1215PM 0130PM STN 261

Fall 2009

ENG 357.001 Love and Theft: Human Trafficking in the Literature of the U.S. South to 1900
David A. Davis MWF 0100PM 0150PM WHM 102

Slavery is the great shame of American history, rivaled only by American Indian removal. Today, Americans regard the idea of human slavery as morally reprehensible, but in the nineteenth century Americans, both northerners and southerners, formulated sincere arguments for and against slavery.  The debate over slavery dominated American culture in the nineteenth century, eventually leading to the Civil War. But the post-war emancipation of slaves did not resolve the problems of race and labor in the United States.

Students in this course will use literature as a means to study the complex issues surrounding human trafficking—the buying and selling of human beings—in America. Some of these issues include  the emergence of the slave trade, the plantation economy, Indian removal, slave insurrection, the nullification debate, abolitionism, secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, sharecropping, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, local color, minstrelsy, miscegenation, populism, and Jim Crow laws.

HIS 356.001 Civil War and Reconstruction
Sarah Gardner TR 0925AM 1040AM LAN 301

The eminent historian Allen Nevins prefaced the fifth volume of his seminal eight-volume history of the Civil War by asserting: “The Civil War, fought by every element in the Northern and Southern population, was a people’s war, a Volkskrieg, in a fuller sense than any earlier conflict in earlier time.[ . . .] The people, both Confederates and Unionists, rose the most desperate effort of their history.  The tenacity with which the North fought on to total victory and the South to almost total ruin vindicated their claim to heroic strength of character, and left the country memories which partially redeem the record of a needless war.”  This course on the Civil War and Reconstruction will ask students to assess Nevins’ judgment as they explore the military, political, economic, and social aspects of the war as well as the effects, problems, and promises of Reconstruction.  Students will read intensively in both primary and secondary literature.

POL 333.001 Southern Politics
Chris Grant TR 0140PM 0255PM KNT 206

Southern Politics is a comparative survey of political development and culture of each of the eleven former Confederate states. Attention is given to each state with particular emphasis on Georgia. Overarching phenomina in Southern Politics such as African-American political empowerment, partisan realignment, Congressional representation, and the region's influence in Presidential selection are also explored.

GBK 495.001 Faulkner
Sarah Gardner MWF 0200PM 0250PM GRV 112

This course explores the fictional world of William Faulkner.  Students will examine Faulkner’s conceptualization and representations of history, fiction, and the American South.  We will read Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, Light in August, Intruder in the Dust, The Unvanquished, The Hamlet as well as selected short stories and prose writings.  The final project asks students to write an introductory essay and to compile a table of contents for a “New Portable Faulkner.” An optional field trip to Oxford, Mississippi will be offered.