Production - Take On The South

John T. Edge

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John T. Edge writes a monthly column, “United Tastes,” for the New York Times.  He is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and a longtime columnist for the Oxford American and a contributing editor at Gourmet.  His work for Saveur and other magazines has been featured in seven editions of the Best Food Writing compilation.  He has been nominated for five James Beard Foundation Awards, including two M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Awards.  In 2009, he was inducted into Beard’s Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America.  Edge holds a master’s degree in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi.  He is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. He has a number of books to his credit, including the James Beard Award-nominated cookbook, A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South.  A four books series on iconic American eats:  Fried Chicken:  An American Story; Apple Pie: An American Story; Hamburgers & Fries:  An American Story; and Donuts:  An American Passion.  Southern Belly:  The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South.  Edge is editor of the foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.  And he is general editor of the book series, Cornbread Nation:  The Best of Southern Food Writing.  Edge has served as culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, and he has been featured on dozens of televisions shows, from CBS Sunday Morning to Iron Chef. 

Matt & Ted Lee

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Siblings Matt and Ted grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. When they left to attend colleges in the Northeast, they so missed the foods of their hometown that they founded The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue, a mail-order catalogue for southern pantry staples like stone-ground grits, fig preserves, and, of course, boiled peanuts. When an editor of a travel magazine asked them to write a story about road-tripping their home state in search of great food, they embarked on a second career as food and travel journalists. They currently write food stories for Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, GQ, The New York Times, and are the wine columnists for Martha Stewart Living.
The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook won Amazon Editors' #1 Best Cookbook of 2006, two International Association of Culinary Professionals awards (including the Julia Child Award) and two James Beard Awards, including Cookbook of the Year. They are the youngest authors ever to take Cookbook of the Year.  Simple Fresh Southern was also recently nominated for a James Beard Award.

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Dr. Peter Coclanis

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Peter A. Coclanis is Associate Provost for International Affairs and Albert R. Newsome Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill. After taking his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1984, he joined the faculty at Chapel Hill and has been there ever since. He specializes in southern, Southeast Asian, and international economic and business history and has published widely in these fields. His first book, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1989) won the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize. He is currently completing a book, based on his 2006 Averitt Lectures at Georgia Southern University, entitled Home and the World: Perspectives on the Economic History of the American South (University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Stanley L. Engerman

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Stanley L. Engerman is John H. Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester, where he has taught since 1963 after one year as Assistant Professor at Yale University. He received a B.S. (in accounting) from the School of Commerce at New York University in 1952, an M.B.A from NYU's Graduate School of Business in 1958, and a Ph.D. in economics from The Johns Hopkins University in 1962.

Engerman has been past president of the Economic History Association and the Social Science History Association. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African - American Research at Harvard University. In addition, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association and has been Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University.

Author of Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom: Comparative Studies (the Fleming Lectures), he is co-author (with Robert W. Fogel) of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, and (with Lance E. Davis) Naval Blockades in Peace and War. He is also co-editor of, among other works, The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (with Robert W. Fogel); A Historical Guide to World Slavery (with Seymour Drescher) and the 3-volume Cambridge Economic History of the United States (with Robert Gallman). Currently in progress are the 4-volume Cambridge History of World Slavery (with David Eltis), and Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Economic Growth (with Kenneth Sokoloff). He has also been author or co-author of over 100 articles dealing with slavery, abolition, and world economic history.

Dr. Trudier Harris

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Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches African American literature and folklore. She earned her B.A. from Stillman College and her M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1973) from The Ohio State University. She taught at the College of William and Mary for six years before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, which won the 1987 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature (2002). Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared from Beacon Press in 2003, and her latest book, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South, is forthcoming from LSU Press in June 2009.

Dr. Noel Polk

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Dr. Noel Polk is a native Mississippian. BA MA Mississippi College 1965, 1966. PhD. U of South Carolina 1970. English Professor at University of Southern Mississippi for 27 years before moving to Mississippi State University in 2004 to teach and to edit The Mississippi Quarterly. Professor Emeritus as of August 31, 2008, but retains the editorship of The Mississippi Quarterly. 81-82 was Professeur Associé at the University of Strasbourg, France; Spring 1996 Professeur Invité at the University of Brittany 2, in Rennes France; shorter teaching stints at universities in Poland and Japan. Have published and lectured widely on Faulkner, Welty, and other southern writers throughout this country, Europe, Japan, and the former Soviet Union. Major publications include William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun: A Textual and Critical STudy; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; Eudora Welty A Bibliography of Her Work; Outside the Southern Myth; and Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition.

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Thomas Schaller

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Dr. Thomas F. Schaller (Ph.D., North Carolina, 1997) is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He teaches courses in American government, including the U.S. presidency, Congress, and interest group behavior. He is author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, and co-author of Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-First Century. A twice-monthly political columnist for the Baltimore Sun and contributing writer for Salon, he has published commentaries in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Daily News, The American Prospect, and The New Republic, and has appeared on ABC News, The Colbert Report, MSNBC, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Talk of the Nation” programs, The Tavis Smiley Show, and C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. Schaller has given lectures on American politics in Brazil, Egypt, India, Italy, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey on behalf of the U.S. State Department.

Earl Black

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Earl Black is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice University. His field is American politics, with special attention to the changing politics of the American South. In partnership with his twin brother, Merle Black of Emory University, he has written three books for Harvard University Press on southern politics: POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN THE SOUTH (1987), THE VITAL SOUTH: HOW PRESIDENTS ARE ELECTED (1992), and THE RISE OF SOUTHERN REPUBLICANS (2002). THE RISE OF SOUTHERN REPUBLICANS was chosen by THE ECONOMIST as one of the best books published in 2002. His new book, co-authored with Merle Black, is DIVIDED AMERICA: THE FEROCIOUS POWER STRUGGLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. This book focuses on voters, parties, and elections according to regional and national trends. Simon & Schuster published DIVIDED AMERICA in March 2007. DIVIDED AMERICA was selected by CHOICE Magazine in 2008 as an “Outstanding Academic Book.” The paperback edition of DIVIDED AMERICA was published in March 2008. Over his career Black has given thousands of interviews concerning southern and national politics, including interviews with most major American newspapers and appearances on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, C-SPAN, National Public Radio, and the BBC.

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