Death in the American South

Editors Craig Thompson Friend
Department of History
NC State University
craig_friend@ncsu.edu

Lorri Glover
Department of History
St. Louis University
lglover1@slu.edu

We are accepting proposals for an edited collection on death in the American South. The region has long been burdened by a reputation as the Haunted South, one built upon the persistence of death, evidenced for example in the malarial environments of the colonial South, Indian wars, the atrocities of slavery, dueling, high maternal death rates in the Antebellum era, the Civil War and the Confederate dead, lynching, the struggles of the Depression, Civil Rights assassinations and murders, and most recently Hurricane Katrina. This edited collection is designed to highlight ways in which death framed southern life and history. We invite scholarship on a variety of topics, including but not limited to
* murder, political assassination, lynching, war deaths
* the right to die (suicide, euthanasia, self-sacrifice)
* the right to kill (death penalty, eugenics, assisted dying, and sacrifice)
* bodily disposal, burial customs, graveyards and cemeteries
* acts of commemoration, mourning practices, and rituals
* treatment of human remains in archaeology, pathology, and museum practice
* poetic, literary, and musical interpretations of death * dichotomies between history and memory
* mourning, bereavement, coping with grief
* death and sex
* representations of death in public history interpretations, including thanatourism
* religion and the meaning of death
* ritualization of death
* privacy/intimacy of death
* the cult of death

Ideally, your final article will be 28-30 pages in length (including notes). If interested in contributing, please send an abstract, not longer than 500 words outlining the topic(s) to be addressed, methodologies used, and how the paper will contribute to the general theme of the collection to: Craig Friend (craig_friend@ncsu.edu) by July 1, 2011. Please also indicate whether you will want to include images and how many. When submitting include “Death in the American South” in the subject line. Authors will be notified by August 1, 2011 as to whether they will be invited to prepare a full paper. We would expect completed essays submitted by 1 March 2012.