Advisory Board for C of C’s Program in Southern Studies: Karen Chandler, Mari Crabtree, Adam Domby, Julia Eichelberger (Program Director), Tammy Ingram, Gibbs Knotts, Simon Lewis, Scott Peeples
Arts Management professor Karen Chandler has immersed herself in the jazz tradition in Charleston and South Carolina through her work as Co-Founder of The Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI) and has collaborated extensively with Charleston’s leading jazz performers.
Some of her publications trace Charleston’s early jazz musicians, including the Jenkins Orphanage Bands, and she has produced Legends, a CD recording of live and studio jazz music with a 22-piece big band. In the past, Dr. Chandler has served as director of the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and Director of the University of Virginia’s African-American Cultural Center, among other appointments. Her expertise in arts management is further reflected on service to numerous editorial and advisory boards from Charleston to Columbia to New York City. As the director of the College’s Arts Management program, she is eager for Arts Management students to take advantage of Southern Studies offerings.
Dr. Mari Crabtree, Department of African American Studies, teaches courses on major debates in African American Studies, African American music, mass incarceration, and collective memories of racial violence. Her Spring 2016 AAST 340 course, “Race, Violence, and Memory in American History,” counts toward the Southern Studies minor. In Fall 2016, semester, Dr. Crabtree was featured in an article in Mother Jones and organized a teach-in on campus, “Tools for Navigating Post-Election America.” Her research includes a book manuscript entitled, “My Soul is a Witness: Lynching and Southern Memory, 1940–1970,” an article on the cultural meaning of ghosts in African American folklore, and a book of intellectual history on critiques of white supremacy.
Dr. Adam Domby is a historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the American South. 
Among his research interests are Civil War and Reconstruction, Historical Memory, Southern History, and Military History. Using his expertise on Reconstruction, Dr. Domby is working with a group of faculty and public historians to create a public historical marker for the South Carolina constitutional convention that was held in Charleston in 1868. His current book project focuses on how southerners fought their neighbors in three divided southern communities during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Close examination of the social dynamics of these southern communities reveals new insights into why the Confederacy lost, why Reconstruction failed, and the distinctiveness of southern society, culture, and politics.
Dr. Julia Eichelberger, Professor of English and director of the program in Southern Studies, teaches courses on Southern literature (Spring 2017), postwar American poetry, African American literature, and Charleston writers (Fall 2017). In 2015 she and History professor Tammy Ingram developed the College’s program in Southern Studies and an interdisciplinary course, Introduction to Southern Studies, which she’ll be teaching in 2017. 
Her publications include essays on African American and Southern literature; in 2013 she selected and edited Welty’s unpublished letters in Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949 (UP of Mississippi) and contributed a chapter to Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race (U of Georgia P). She is completing a co-edited volume, Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First Century Approaches and continues to do research on Welty and on Charleston writers.
Dr. Tammy Ingram, a History professor, teaches courses on the South since 1865 and on other topics in American history: gender and sexuality, history and film, “The History of Crime in America, “Race and Rebellion,” and more. During 2016-17 she’s at Yale University on a fellowship at the Gilda Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In 2015 Dr. Ingram partnered with Julia Eichelberger to develop the College’s minor in Southern Studies and its new introductory course, Southern Studies 200, which she is looking forward to teaching when she returns to C of C. 
Dr. Ingram’s award-winning book Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930 (UNC Press, 2014) explores the construction of the nation’s first interstate highway system. Her new book project is The Wickedest City in America: Sex, Race, and Organized Crime in the Jim Crow South, examining intersections among criminal enterprise, government corruption, challenges to the sexual and racial order, and ideas about modernization and urbanization in the New South. Dr. Ingram has contributed essays and op-eds to publications such as H-Net, Like the Dew, the Huffington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Gibbs Knotts joined the Department of Political Science as Department Chair in 2012. He teaches undergraduate courses in American politics, including one on Southern politics, and graduate courses in the public administration program. 
He’s published scholarly essays on southern politics and co-edited The New Politics of North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). His new co-authored book is The Resilience of Southern Identity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He also comments on politics for local, regional, and national media such as CNN and the Huffington Post.
Professor Simon Lewis has been teaching courses in African and Third World Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. He is director of the African Studies program, interim director of the African American Studies program, an associate director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program, and editor of the literary journal Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing.
He’s written and edited several books, including British and African Literature in Transnational Context (UP of Florida, 2011). In 2013 he convened the 39th annual conference of the African Literature Association with the theme “Literature, Liberation, and the Law” and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, devoted to 21st-century African literature.
Scott Peeples, Professor of English, teaches courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, including a recent course on American Gothic literature. He looks forward to teaching Southern Studies 200 after completing his term of service as English Department Chair. The former editor of the journal Poe Studies, Dr. Peeples has published two books on Edgar Allan Poe and many essays on nineteenth-century American literature. Two essays focused on Lowcountry figures are “Love and Theft in the Carolina Lowcountry” (Arizona Quarterly 60.2) and “Unburied Treasure: Edgar Allan Poe in the South Carolina Lowcountry,” with photographs by Michelle Van Parys, in Southern Cultures 22.2 (2016): 5-22.
