William “Bill” Ferris, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Bill Clinton, is the Joel Williamson Professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also the senior associate director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.

Ferris is an acclaimed folklorist, photographer, blues scholar and documentary filmmaker. He has published 10 books, including “The South in Color: A Visual Journal” (UNC Press, 2016), “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists” (UNC Press, 2013) and “Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues.” He has made 15 documentary films, many of which deal with African-American music and folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” (UNC Press, 1989), which is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk and academic cultures.

Ferris will discuss his most recent book, “The South in Color,” a provocative color photograph collection from the 1960s and 1970s of his family’s farm in Vicksburg, Mississippi, as well as people and places in the region.

In addition, on Saturday, Sept. 16, at 11 a.m., the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum will host a reading and book signing for “The South in Color.” Ferris will give a short presentation from the book before providing an assessment of the current state of the humanities.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Council, the Center for Appalachian Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Cultural, Gender and Global Studies, and the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum (BRAHM).

The South in Color

A Visual Journal

By William Ferris
2016

Since the moment William Ferris’s parents gave their twelve-year-old son a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera for Christmas in 1954, Ferris passionately began to photograph his world. He has never stopped. The sixties and seventies were a particularly significant period for Ferris as he became a pathbreaking documentarian of the American South. This beautiful, provocative collection of 100 of Ferris’s photographs of the South, taken during this formative period, capture the power of his color photography. Color film, as Ferris points out in the book’s introduction, was not commonly used by documentarians during the latter half of the twentieth century, but Ferris found color to work in significant ways in the photographic journals he created of his world in all its permutations and surprises.

The volume opens with images of his family’s farm and its workers--family and hired--southeast of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The images are at once lyrical and troubling. As Ferris continued to photograph people and their homes, churches, and blues clubs, their handmade signs and folk art, and the roads that wound through the region, divisive racial landscapes become part of the record. A foreword by Tom Rankin, professor of visual studies and former director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, provides rich insight into Ferris’s work.

Available from UNC Press

About the College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Appalachian State University is home to 17 academic departments, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. CAS aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and locations. The college’s values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of its students as global citizens. More than 6,800 student majors are enrolled in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing App State’s general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more at https://cas.appstate.edu.

About Appalachian State University

As a premier public institution, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives. App State is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System, with a national reputation for innovative teaching and opening access to a high-quality, affordable education for all. The university enrolls more than 21,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and 80 graduate majors at its Boone and Hickory campuses and through App State Online. Learn more at https://www.appstate.edu.

Sep

15

Marcie Cohen Ferris: The Edible South

The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region

Sep. 15, 2017

3:30 p.m.

114 Belk Library and Information Commons

Marcie Cohen Ferris, professor of American studies at UNC Chapel Hill, will speak about how food – as cuisine and as commodity – has expressed and shaped southern identity. She is the author of “The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region,” published in 2014 by UNC Press.

Learn more