the THE NEWSLETTER OF THE
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • SUMMER 2009
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
New Southern Studies Faculty Member Zandria Robinson James Haile
Z
andria Robinson will join the faculty in the fall as the new McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology. Robinson, who calls herself “an urban Southerner,” grew up in Memphis, the daughter of a mother raised in Memphis and a father from Coahoma County, Mississippi. She says she grew up thinking about the differences between city people and country people and has never really stopped. Describing herself as a nosy person from early childhood, Robinson was drawn to academic projects that allow her to talk and listen to people. With her six-year-old daughter, Assata, she will be moving to Oxford in August. As an undergraduate the University of Memphis, Robinson became interested in Southern topics as a subject for academic study in English classes, reading the works of Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Studying African American literature raised questions about the idea of reclaiming the South, an issue that seemed especially intriguing to Robinson, who felt many of the African Americans she knew had already claimed the South. Of the authors she read, Zora Neale Hurston stood out as particularly inspiring because she both wrote fiction and
Zandria Robinson did social science research. Robinson recalls that a turning point for her was an undergraduate class on sociology and race. She started studying sociology and went on to get an MA in the discipline at the University of Memphis. Robinson says she faces a tension or perhaps even a contradiction within her own work. She loves the empirical side of sociology, with the potential to counting things, deduce patterns, and prove arguments, but she is sometimes drawn to subjects that are hard to count.
For her graduate work, Robinson went to Northwestern University, home of many of the country’s leading sociologists, with the goal of doing ethnographic work in a Southern city. She discovered that few urban sociologists were studying the American South, perhaps because of the assumption that all American cities and the issues they faced were more or less alike. When asked for a short version of the question that motivates her research, Robinson continued on page 35