On the Horizon: Eudora Welty as Photographer

The latest addition to UPM's imressive list of original works by Eudora Welty is titled Eudora Welty as Photographer. This book is a selection of 43 photographs that provide insight into Welty's artistic vision. Eudora Welty as Photographer will be available from UPM in March.

These 43 photographs, taken in the 1930s and 1940s with three different cameras, illustrate both the formal and narrative skills of framing the world as only a great short story writer could. They show Eudora Welty (1909–2001) ardently pursuing an audience and honing her technique as she worked behind the lens.

Paramount in Eudora Welty as Photographer are the photographs themselves. Only nine have been published previously. The accompanying essays—by Welty scholar Pearl Amelia McHaney; by Chief curator of photography at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Sandra S. Phillips; and by photographer and photography historian Deborah Willis—describe Welty’s developing aesthetic and her representations of the world as illustrated by the photographs.

Welty took photographs of people, animals, patterns, shadows, and structures—natural and man-made—in Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and North Carolina. The photographs are paired to contrast and complement, to surprise and suggest, and to please and provoke. Among the photographs in Eudora Welty as Photographer are prints exhibited in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1934; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1935; and in New York City in 1936 and 1937.

UPM Awarded Share of Folkore Grant

Three university presses share grant
from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for book series in folklore

The University Press of Mississippi, the University of Illinois Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in collaboration with the American Folklore Society, have been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new book series entitled Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World. The grant funds a collaborative venture by the presses to develop and publish at least eighteen first books in the field of folklore. The grant is part of a larger initiative by the Mellon Foundation to support scholarship in underserved or emerging fields and to support the work of university presses in publishing in these fields.

Because folklore is a networked discipline connected to many fields and departments, it can sometimes be difficult for good folklore books to find a publishing home. This initiative will create opportunities for some of the best work in our field to reach their audiences, thus helping to build a healthy communications ecology in our field.

Dr. Timothy Lloyd, Executive Director of the American Folklore Society

This new series will emphasize the interdisciplinary and international nature of current folklore scholarship, highlighting aspects of folklore studies such as world folk cultures, folk art and music, foodways, dance, African American and ethnic studies, gender and queer studies, and popular culture. “In effect, folklorists document the connections between a community and its cultural production,” the Illinois Press noted in announcing the grant. “In a ‘new age’ that tends to appropriate cultural fragments in isolation from their context, folklorists help supply the context and sense of cultural materials.”

With the support of the Mellon Foundation, the presses will organize and sponsor a yearly workshop at the AFS annual conference. These sessions will give invited authors a chance to collaborate intensively on their projects with publishing and scholarly professionals and aid presses in identifying and cultivating the most promising new scholarship. As a means of bringing these books and the series to the attention of scholars and readers beyond the academic field of folklore, the presses plan widespread, interdisciplinary promotion of the funded series and its books through print and electronic media.

Further information on this collaborative initiative, including guidelines for submitting book proposals, is available at www.folklorestudies.org. .

Read further about UPM's foklore titles, here.

Cross the Water Blues Recognized by ARSC

Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe was awarded a Certificate of Merit from Association for Recorded Sound Collections in the category of Best Research in Recorded Blues, Rhythm & Blues, or Soul Music. This title, edited by Neil A. Wynn, is a unique collection of essays that analyzes the the impact of African American music and its European reverberations.

Begun in 1991, the awards are presented to authors and publishers of books, articles, liner notes, and monographs, to recognize outstanding published research in the field of recorded sound. In giving these awards, ARSC recognizes outstanding contributions, encourages high standards, and promotes awareness of superior works. Certificates of Merit are presented to runners-up for works of exceptionally high quality.

Kennedy’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on JFK, by Guido Van Rijn was a finalist in the same category.

Read about other UPM music titles here.

Faye McMahon Awarded Chicago Folkore Prize

The American Folklore Society, the U.S. based international professional society for the field of folklore, has awarded the 2008 Chicago Folklore Prize to Felicia McMahon’s Not Just Child’s Play: Emerging Tradition and the Lost Boys of Sudan, published in 2007 by the University Press of Mississippi.

The Chicago Folklore Prize is the oldest and among the most prestigious international awards of its kind for publishing in folklore. First awarded in 1928, the Chicago Folklore Prize is presented jointly by the AFS and the University of Chicago.

McMahon’s work focuses on Sudanese Di Dinga war refugees relocated to the United States—“The Lost Boys.” Because of the dislocations of war in Sudan, The Lost Boys, though now grown, were never properly initiated into manhood according to tribal custom and so are caught in a state of cultural childhood. Not Just Child’s Play calls attention to the Lost Boys’ attempts to preserve their native dance and ritual--transnational, cobbled-together, hybrid, but absolutely and authentically theirs.

The American Folklore Society’s review committee described Not Just Child’s Play as “multi-layered and thought-provoking, yet written in a clear and jargon-free prose.” The committee continues, lauding McMahon’s topic and research methods as “painfully relevant to us in an age of extended war, population displacement and economic globalization.”

Felicia R. McMahon is a research professor in anthropology at Syracuse University. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has published in several folklore journals and is the coeditor of Children's Folklore: A Sourcebook, which won an American Folklore Society Opie Prize for Best Edited Book.

Books published by University Press of Mississippi have been awarded the Chicago Folklore Prize in three of the last four years.

Best of 2008

A Top 10 or Best of the Year list is a great way for columnists to reflect on the year that was. It may be a tad late for UPM to compile a Top 10 list, but a few book editors and bloggers saw their way clear to include UPM books among their 2008 favorites.

A small sampling below:

• In his 2008 wrap-up, comics blogger Paul Gravett included two UPM books, Art Spiegelman: Conversations and History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, among his best English-language books about comics.
  
  
• Susan Larson, book editor at the Times-Picayune, listed You Are Where You Eat among her top 10 books for 2008.
  
  
• And Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports listed The Courting of Marcus Dupree among his favorite books of 2008. Technically, Marcus Dupree, is not a 2008 book (first published in 1983). But Wetzel included the classic on his list because the "reporting style, observations and prose are simply incredible. You’ve never read anything like it."

Outstanding Academic Titles

Two University Press of Mississippi titles have been named to the latest Outstanding Academic Title list from Choice. The 2008 selections from UPM are:

• The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 by James F. Barnett Jr. This book portrays the way that the Natchez coped with a rapidly changing world, became entangled with the political ambitions of two European superpowers, France and England, and eventually disappeared as a people.

• The Beatles: Image and the Media by Michael R. Frontani. A study of the cultural forces that transformed four Liverpool musicians into icons for the 1960s.

These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as important--often the first--treatment of their subject. Choice Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the "best of the best."

UPM had 4 titles on the 2007 OAT list.