William R. Ferris, Rock Star of Southern Culture

William R. Ferris, keynote speaker for the Seventh Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference authors’ reception and banquet, held at Clarksville Country Club on Thursday night, is as close to being a rock star as you can get in the world of Southern culture and its study.

Although now the Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, professor of history, and adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was formerly the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) beginning in 1997 when he was appointed by President William Jefferson Clinton.'

From 1972 to 1979, he was an associate professor in the American and Afro-American Studies Programs at Yale University. During his tenure at Yale, Ferris co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore in Mississippi, and was its director from 1972 to 1984. Ferris returned to the South, and, from 1979 to 1997, he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and a professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. While there, he established several annual conferences, including Oxford Conference for the Book, the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, and conferences on Elvis Presley, civil rights and the law, and civil rights and media among other cultural programs. In 2002, Ferris was a Visiting Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars....