Social Sciences Forum
Wednesday, April 2 | 4:00 p.m.
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, 7th Floor
The annual Low Lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of History.
From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture represented the American South by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, and white-columned mansions. In Dreaming of Dixie (2011), Professor Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South played to consumers’ anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America’s pastoral traditions. Professor Cox will also examine more recent representations of the South on television from The Andy Griffith Show to reality TV.
Karen L. Cox is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the founding director of the graduate public history program. Dr. Cox received her B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and her Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the author of two books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, forthcoming 2012), which won the 2013 Allen G. Noble Award for the best edited collection in North American material culture from the Pioneer America Society. She is also at work on a third monograph entitled Where the Old South Still Lives: Murder, Race, and the Southern Gothic, set in 1930s Natchez, Mississippi.
Dr. Cox has published op-eds in The New York Times and has appeared on C-Span, as well as several radio broadcasts including Canadian Public Radio. She maintains a blog, Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture.
Admission is free.
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