Tag: Summersell Center for the Study of the South


UA Professor Featured in TLC Show “Who Do You Think You Are?”

Dr. Lesley Gordon helps actor Noah Wyle learn about his family history on an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?"

From the July 2017 Desktop News | “Who Do You Think You Are?” This is the question actor Noah Wyle, known for his role in “ER,” set out to answer with the help of Dr. Lesley J. Gordon, the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at UA.  This popular television series follows celebrities as they search for information on their genealogical history. During Wyle’s episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?,” which aired on TLC earlier this year, Gordon helped […]

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Digitizing Social Justice

“‘To See Justice Done’: Letters from the Scottsboro Trials,” is a new online database, showcasing primary resources from the Scottsboro Trials.

From the November 2016 Desktop News | Margaret Sasser, a 2014 alumna, spent one summer during her Master’s program digging through archives at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, Alabama. She had been hired by Dr. Ellen Spears, an associate professor in New College and the Department of American Studies, to sort through roughly 17 boxes of letters, postcards, telegrams, petitions, and resolutions sent to Alabama Governor Benjamin Meeks Miller regarding the 1930s Scottsboro Trials—and last month her work […]

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UA Appoints New Summersell Chair and Director of Hudson Strode Program

From the September 2016 Desktop News | The College of Arts and Sciences welcomes the new Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History and the new director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History Dr. Lesley Jill Gordon, former professor of history at the University of Akron, is the new Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama. The Summersell Chair endowment was established in 1997 by […]

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Documenting the Civil Rights Movement

From the October 2015 Desktop News | Dr. Doris A. Derby, a documentary photographer and civil rights activist, donated a historic photograph from the civil rights era to The University of Alabama during the opening reception of an exhibit featuring her photographs. The exhibit, “Fertile Ground: The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy in the Mississippi Delta,” will be displayed through Oct. 30 at The University of Alabama Gallery in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in downtown Tuscaloosa. Derby’s […]

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‘The Help’ Author Returns to UA

University of Alabama alumna and New York Times best-selling novelist Kathryn Stockett will let readers behind the curtain Friday, Feb. 28, when she shares the story behind her novel, “The Help.” Stockett, whose 2009 novel became the basis for a hit movie starring Emma Stone, based the book—at least in part—on some of her own experiences growing up in neighboring Mississippi. The novel tells the story of increasing racial interactions and tensions in the 1960s between high society Caucasians in […]

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Cultural Arts Center Gallery Unveils Next Exhibition

The next exhibition in The University of Alabama Gallery in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, “Wash by Margaret Wrinkle: Seeing Across the Divide,” features a series of photographs taken by Wrinkle at slavery-related sites throughout the South while researching her critically acclaimed novel, “Wash.” Published by Grove/Atlantic, Wrinkle’s novel “Wash” reexamines American slavery in ways that challenge many contemporary assumptions about race, power, history, and healing as it carries the reader from the American South to West Africa. Wrinkle paired each of her […]

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