Sharpen your pencils and your southern studies!
Students and scholars can often read for free! We’re indexed via Project Muse and JStor. If you’re home institution subscribes to either service, back issues are available at your fingertips.
We’re also making it easier for students and scholars to use Southern Cultures in the classroom. Check out our collection of directed readings to inform classroom discussions or syllabi. “Southern Cultures isn’t just for students of the South,” writes folklorist Katherine Roberts. “It is for anyone interested in social and cultural complexity, conversations about place-based practices and in symbolic and aesthetic display.”
Directed Readings:
Monuments & Memory
In light of renewed demands for the removal of Confederate monuments from public grounds, we compile a list of Southern Cultures essays about monuments and memorials in the South. These essays examine historical contexts surrounding the crafting and establishment of monuments to the Confederacy as well as to the Civil Rights Era, and they address the power of public commemoration to further preferred social narratives. Readings >
Protest
We might say that most essays in Southern Cultures have a protest angle, since they tend to push back—explicitly or implicitly—against facile assumptions about southerners. With this following group of essays, students may be encouraged to explore assumptions, push-back about what it has meant—and continues to mean—to want change in the South and beyond. Readings >
Food
Southern Cultures is a prime source for southern food scholarship. Three special issues devoted to food studies and regular contributions on foodways demonstrate the journal’s methodological strengths—oral history, ethnography, archival-based research. Readings >
Music
Music is baked into Southern Cultures. We have run no less than eight special issues devoted to musics of the South. The following essays demonstrate the way southern music helps us understand the diverse communities of the South, including communities of musicians themselves. Consistent themes for students to explore here include: race, identity, authenticity, and genre. Readings >
Interviews & Oral Histories
A strength of Southern Cultures is its content of archives-researched and interview-based essays. Southern Cultures has a close relationship with the Southern Oral History Program and the fruits of its labors feature prominently on our pages. Readings >
Visual Culture
Southern Cultures is an excellent resource for the study of visual representations of the South. Images accompany all essays, and in some cases, the images comprise the essay. Illustrations come from archives and from contributors’ own collections, many times representing the work of an author on a single, in-depth documentary project. Readings >
Image: Penciled In, by Amy S. Hoppe.