Madd Heartley turned her interest in folk music into a project that explores the impact of civil rights activists and folk musicians Guy and Candie Carawan on the development of Johns Island, South Carolina. Johns Island is part of the … Read more

Graduate student Moriah James was attending the 2019 Black Communities Conference co-chaired by her faculty adviser, Karla Slocum, when she met a panelist who was presenting on a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, called “Nauck” or Green Valley. (See profile on … Read more

The landscapes in graduate student Anna Hamilton’s hometown of St. Augustine in northern Florida are changing in a very visceral way. She shared an example from a fishing trip with her dad on the Matanzas River this past summer. “You … Read more

Diamond Holloman is fascinated with what she calls the “sister concepts of vulnerability and resilience” that she has witnessed firsthand among the people of Robeson County, North Carolina. Hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence two years later brought devastating flooding … Read more

Southern Futures is a new campuswide initiative that supports cutting-edge scholarship, creative endeavors and thoughtful conversations across disciplines, in partnership with the Center for the Study of the American South, the College of Arts & Sciences, Carolina Performing Arts, University … Read more

I’ve lived on dirt roads that bent and ended at a gate of pines, the dust skipped up didn’t make my mother look like a dream. I’ve lived on roads that dragged through America, I’ve paced only them to the … Read more

Richard Watkins, program coordinator for Chancellor’s Science Scholars (CSS), shares how UNC helped shape his career path and why he invests in the next generation of STEM talent. Watkins earned his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology, with a specialty in … Read more

Alumnus Elijah Heyward is guiding plans for the new International African American Museum on the site of the largest point of entry for enslaved people into the United States. When Elijah Heyward III (Ph.D. American studies ’18) enrolled at Yale … Read more

Anthropologist Karla Slocum focuses on the historic and contemporary significance of Black communities. Her latest book highlights Oklahoma, which has one of the largest concentrations of Black towns in the United States. Karla Slocum is fascinated with the idea of … Read more

David and Karin Pfennig have created a home away from home in the Arizona desert. Every summer, the couple conduct fieldwork on spadefoot toads. In addition to the graduate students they bring along, they have a pair of special assistants … Read more