We are excited to share the good news that Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris has been appointed interim director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Dr. Ferris is a valued member of our UNC campus community and longtime friend and supporter of the Center, having previously served as interim director, senior leadership advisor, and trusted colleague, as well as faculty editor of Southern Cultures for nearly a decade. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Ferris back in this capacity and read more about her work below. We’d also like to thank our previous director, Dr. Blair LM Kelley, who is the new president and director of the National Humanities Center. Congratulations, Dr. Kelley!

Born and raised in northeastern Arkansas, Ferris’s deep attachment to the study of place and the American South is rooted in her childhood. For more than forty years, she has studied, documented, interpreted, exhibited, taught, and written about the South, largely through its foodways, material culture, and the southern Jewish experience. She’s committed to fostering the creative economies of an evolving and vibrant region.

As a professor emeritus in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ferris is an editor for Southern Cultures, a quarterly journal of the history and cultures of the U.S. South, and a project of the Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS). Ferris served as CSAS interim director in 2022–2023, where she remains actively engaged in the Center’s work as well as teaching and scholarship. She was co-chair of UNC-Chapel Hill’s pan-university academic theme, FOOD FOR ALL: LOCAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES, 2015–2018. Under her leadership, a food studies minor was initiated at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2018. From 2006 to 2008, Ferris served as president of the board of directors of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Ferris’s major publications include: The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, and the co-authored Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History. Ferris is the editor of Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor (UNC Press, 2022), an exploration of the contemporary food movement in North Carolina, including 20 essays, the photography of Baxter Miller, and 20 recipes.

Ferris lives in Chapel Hill with her husband, folklorist and Southern Studies scholar, Bill Ferris, wonderfully nearby family, and one and sometimes more Labrador Retrievers.