Lamar Lecture

Jon Wells presents the 2017 Lamar Lecture.
Dr. Jon Wells gives the 2017 Lamar Lecture on the topic "Blind No More: Southern Slavery, Free Soil, and the Coming of the Civil War."

The Lamar Lecture series, made possible by the bequest of the late Dorothy Blount Lamar, began in 1957. The series promotes the permanent preservation of Southern culture, history, and literature, and it is recognized as the most important lecture series on Southern history and literature in the United States. The University of Georgia Press publishes The Lamar Lecture Series.

Leslie Harris, professor of American History at Northwestern University, will present the 2025 lecture.

Previous Lamar Lectures

  • 2024      Jay Watson (Mississippi) “Ruinate Green: Southern Literatures and Environmental Lost Cause-ism
  • 2023      Heather Williams (Pennsylvania) “Small Pieces Together: Writing Histories of 19th Century African Americans”
  • 2022      Melanie Benson Taylor (Dartmouth) “The Weird South”
  • 2021 – Fitz Brundage (North Carolina) — The Prisoner of War Experience and the American Civil War
  • 2020 – Scott Romine (North Carolina) — The Zombie Memes of Dixie: Exploring how “the South” has Developed in Popular Culture
  • 2019 — Jon F. Sensbach (Florida) — Dream, Tremble, Fly: Slavery and Sacred Experience in the Revolutionary South
  • 2018 — Barbara Ladd (Emory) — The North of the South: The Upper South in Literary History
  • 2017 — Jon Wells (Michigan) — Blind No More: Southern Slavery, Free Soil, and the Coming of the Civil War
  • 2016 — John T. Matthews (Boston University) — Hidden in Plain Sight: The Problem of the South in the American Literary Imagination
  • 2015 — Patricia Sullivan (South Carolina) — What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement?
  • 2014 — William L. Andrews (North Carolina) — Class and African American Slave Narrative, 1865-1901
  • 2013 — Daniel Usner (Vanderbilt) — Weaving Alliances with Other Women: American Indian Work in the New South
  • 2012 — Michael Kreyling (Vanderbilt) — A Late Encounter with the Civil War
  • 2011 — Gary Gallagher (Virginia) — Becoming Confederates: Three Paths to a New National Loyalty
  • 2010 — Minrose Gwin (North Carolina) — Remembering Medgar Evers: Aesthetics, Justice, and the Long Civil Rights Movement
  • 2009 — Mark Smith (South Carolina) — Histories of a Hurricane: Camille, 1969
  • 2008 — Paul Harvey (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs) — Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South
  • 2008 — Anne Goodwyn Jones (Mississippi) — Before and After the War: Formations of Southern Manliness (unpublished)
  • 2007 — Richard Gray (Essex) — A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature
  • 2006 — Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) — Teach About the South (unpublished)
  • 2005 — James C. Cobb (Georgia) — Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity
  • 2004 — Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) — Henry Adams and the Southern Question
  • 2003 — Peter H. Wood (Duke) — Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream
  • 2002 — Theda Purdue (North Carolina) — “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South
  • 2001 — Edward Ayers (Virginia), Thadious M. Davis (Vanderbilt), Linda Wagner-Martin (North Carolina), Joel Williamson (North Carolina) — South To the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century
  • 2000 — Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) — Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow
  • 1999 — Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (Mississippi) — Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West
  • 1998 — Eugene D. Genovese (Emory) — A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
  • 1997 — Drew Gilpin Faust (Penn) — Women on Women in the War: The Civil War in Southern Fiction (unpublished)
  • 1996 — Trudier Harris (Emory) — The Power of the Porch: Narrative Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Gaynor, and Randall Kenan
  • 1995 — Jack Temple Kirby (Miami University (Ohio)) — The Countercultural South
  • 1994 — Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Florida) — The Literary Percys
  • 1993 — John Blassingame (Yale) — Planter Testimony (unpublished)
  • 1992 — Eric J. Sundquist (UCLA) — The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern Black Fiction
  • 1991 — Bill Malone (Tulane) — Romance, Realism, and the Musical Culture of the Southern Plain Folk
  • 1990 — Fred Hobson (North Carolina) — The Southern Writer in the Postmodern South
  • 1989 — Lucinda H. MacKethan (North Carolina State) — Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story
  • 1988 — Don E. Fehrenbacher (Stanford) — Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South
  • 1987 — Marion Montgomery (Georgia) — Possum, and Other Receipts for the Recovering of “Southern Being”
  • 1986 — John Shelton Reed (North Carolina) — Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy
  • 1985 — Cleanth Brooks (Yale) — The Language of the American South
  • 1984 — R. Don Higginbotham (North Carolina) — George Washington and the American Military Tradition
  • 1983 — Richard N. Current (North Carolina, Greensboro) — Northernizing the South
  • 1982 — Paul M. Gaston (Virginia) — Women of Fair Hope
  • 1981 — Thomas Daniel Young (Vanderbilt) — Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered
  • 1980 — Samuel S. Hill (Florida) — South and North in American Religion: A Comparative Analysis by Selected Epochs
  • 1979 — Marcus Cunliffe (Sussex) — Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860
  • 1978 — Richard Beale Davis (Tennessee) — A Colonial Southern Bookshelf: Reading the Eighteenth Century
  • 1977 — Jack P. Greene (Johns Hopkins) — Paradise Defined: Studies in the Relationship between Historical Consciousness and the Emergence of Corporate Identities in Plantation America, 1650-1800 (unpublished)
  • 1976 — Merrill D. Peterson (Virginia) — Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue
  • 1975 — Walter Sullivan (Vanderbilt) — A Requiem for the Renascence: The State of Fiction in the Modern South
  • 1974 — Clarence L. Ver Steeg (Northwestern) — Origins of a Southern Mosaic: Studies of Early Carolina and Georgia
  • 1973 — Lewis P. Simpson (Louisiana State) — The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature
  • 1972 — Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (North Carolina) — The Writer in the South
  • 1971 — George B. Tindall (North Carolina) — The Disruption of the Solid South
  • 1970 — Floyd C. Watkins (Emory) — The Death of Art: Black and White in the Recent Southern Novel
  • 1969 — Fletcher M. Green (North Carolina) — The Role of the Yankee in the Old South and Hodding Carter (Greenville, Mississippi) — Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace
  • 1968 — No Lecture
  • 1967 — Clement Eaton (Kentucky) — The Waning of the Old South Civilisation, 1860s-1880s
  • 1966 — C. Hugh Holman (North Carolina) — Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe
  • 1965 — Thomas D. Clark (Kentucky) — Three Paths to the Modern South: Education, Agriculture, and Conservatism
  • 1964 — Edd Winfield Parks (Georgia) — Edgar Allan Poe as Literary Critic
  • 1963 — Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., (Vanderbilt) — The Democratic South
  • 1962 — Arthur Palmer Hudson (North Carolina) — Folklore Keeps the Past Alive
  • 1961 — T. Henry Williams (Louisiana State) — Romance and Realism in Southern Politics
  • 1960 — Jay B. Hubbell (Duke) — Southern Life in Fiction
  • 1959 — Bernard May (Virginia) — Myths and Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson
  • 1957 — Donald Davidson (Vanderbilt) — Southern Writers in the Modern World