About the Author
William Ferris is Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris coedited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and is the author of Blues from the Delta. Rolling Stone magazine has named him among the top ten professors in the United States. In 2010, Ferris received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Description
This recent article in The Daily Beast by Jason Berry offers a splendid glimpse of the early life of Bill Ferris, how that life is expressed in Ferris's new book, The South in Color, and how it led to the vitally important work that Ferris did here in Oxford as the Director for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Do not miss our event for The South in Color and Bill Ferris on Friday, October 7, at 5 p.m. I'm serious, put it in your calendar this minute. -- RH
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.