"William R. Ferris is a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Folklore Curriculum. He is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African-American music and folklore.
"Ferris has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize nominee Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, which contains entries on every aspect of Southern culture and is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk, and academic cultures."
Friday,
March 6
th
7pm at the History Place, Morehead City
"Memory
and a Sense of Place in the American South "
Dr. William R. Ferris
Founding
director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
at Ole Miss, Dr. Ferris has been nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize, has presented a film at the Cannes Film Festival
and has hosted his own Mississippi NPR Blues program.
An expert on Southern folklore and rural music, he is a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and has conducted thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from B.B. King to unknown Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields. He has even earned a place on Rolling Stone Magazine's "Top Ten Professors in the US" list.