AUM to host fifth annual Southern Studies Conference on Feb. 8-9 | Events

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – From “Hee Haw” to Zelda Fitzgerald, there is something to interest all audiences at Auburn Montgomery’s fifth annual Southern Studies Conference on Feb. 8-9. The program will offer a variety of perspectives on Southern culture, covering the areas of literature, history, art, journalism, popular culture, urban planning, gender studies, photography and other topics.

The following events are free and open to the public:

Feb. 7

7:30 p.m. – Promenade concert featuring the Meàllo Trio, which includes vocalist Melanie Williams, guitarist Alan Goldspiel and clarinetist Lori Ardovino. Goodwyn Hall, room 109.

Feb. 8

11 a.m. – Gallery talk by artist Scott Stephens and an exhibit of his cyanotype Southern landscapes. Goodwyn Hall Gallery, room 101.

Those who register for the full conference will also enjoy a number of special receptions and performances not open to the general public, including sessions on a variety of topics including:

• Cormac McCarthy and the Ghost of Huck Finn
• I’ve Been Here From the Start, and I’m Staying to the Finish: Women in Massive Resistance
• Why Do You Hate the South? The American Other in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!”
• Birmingham Reimagined:  The Process of Downtown Revitalization in a Post-Industrial City
• Lost Cause: Vengeance, Justice and the Legacy of the Civil War in Portis’s “True Grit”
• The Color of Civil War Memory: Exploring the Legacy of Slavery in Civil War Re-enacting and Heritage Tourism
• The Small-Town Southern Newspaper: As in Politics, Everything is Local
• A Southerner into the World: Zelda Fitzgerald on Stage
• Flat Top Crowns: Remnant Old-Growth Longleaf in the American South
• A Good Place to be From: Images of the Rural South
• Southern Identity and Global Reality

• Southern Fundamentalism and British Evangelicalism: Southerners in London’s Pulpits during World War I

•   “Hee Haw”: America was Pickin’ and Grinnin’ in the Kornfield

• Audubon’s South: Landscape Reflections and Environmental Change

• Contemporary Grave-Marking in the Southern Cemetery

• Eudora Welty’s Tyrannous Eye: Nonfiction and Photography

• Canines in the Cotton: Dogs in the Antebellum South
• African-Americans, Southern Foodways, and Racial Uplift
• From Rural Roads to Peacock Alleys: Culture Clashes Along the Dixie Highway

• Zora Neale Hurston: Progression, Personification, and Place

For more information or to register, visit www.aum.edu/aumlac.

Information Source: AUM