More than the Center’s home, the Love House is a place for those engaged in exploring the American South and shaping its future—students, faculty, and community members alike.
We hope you become involved with the Center through classes, events, subscribing to our journal, or applying for grants and fellowships. This year, we celebrate our thirty-third year as an award-winning research and public humanities center. CSAS fosters research and collaboration to deepen understanding of southern social, political, and intellectual life, publishing and preserving the voices that shape the region’s evolving story—work that carries forward this year through our initiative, Southern Thresholds, and its thematic cycles: Southern Democracy, Geographies of Belonging, and Climate Futures.
We are excited to welcome new and old faces to the Center this fall. Melody Hunter-Pillion (PhD ‘25) joins us as acting director of SOHP while Renée Alexander Craft is on research leave. UNC History doctoral candidate Hooper Schultz, the 2026–27 McColl Fellow, is a wonderful addition to our team, as are our 2026–27 SOHP Field Scholars. And we’re thrilled to welcome a new Southern Cultures editorial assistant; the next cohort of Southern Futures fellows; and undergraduates in the SOHP fall seminar, whose projects will focus on the history of UNC’s historic Campus Y (est. 1859). We expand our classroom offerings with seminars on public folklore and university history offered by friends in Folklore and the Honors College.
We have a full slate of events planned this fall, beginning on Thursday with a welcome back happy hour on the porch. We hope you’ll join us for food, fellowship, and fiddle tunes by award-winning musician Joseph Decosimo (PhD ’18). You can also get a sneak-peek of our fall exhibition, Infinite Poem, by American Studies doctoral student Emily Williams, which is particularly meaningful for me. Both of us have conducted fieldwork and research on southern Jewish communities, but over thirty-five years apart. We’ll celebrate this work—and the launch of the Religion issue of Southern Cultures, guest edited by historian Shari Rabin—on October 1. Please find our full calendar of events below.
Here’s to a new academic year filled with creativity, knowledge-building, solidarity, and joy.
Marcie Cohen Ferris
Director, Center for the Study of the American South
