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Founders Day/Omicron Delta Kappa Convocation

January 19, 2015

5:00 PM

Wilson Concert Hall

Julie Cline

The speaker at the Founders Day/ODK Convocation is James C. Cobb, who holds the B. Phinizy Spalding Professorship in History at the University of Georgia, and has written widely on the interaction between economy, society and culture in the American South. The title of his talk is "Would the Past Be Better Off Dead."

A former president of the Southern Historical Association, he is the author of several books, including “The Selling of The South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1990” (1993), “The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity” (1992), “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity” (2005) and “The South and America Since World War II” (2010).

A native Georgian, Cobb received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. He taught at the University of Tennessee and the University of Mississippi before joining the University of Georgia. He blogs at cobbloviate.com.

Among his many honors are a stint as Senior Visiting Mellon Scholar, Cambridge University, 1995; the McClemore Prize, Mississippi Historical Society, for the outstanding book in Mississippi history, 1992; the Green-Ramsdell Award, Journal of Southern History, for best article, 1990–91 and 1988–89; the E. Merton Coulter Award, Georgia Historical Quarterly, for best article, 1984; an Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Study, 1982; the Parks-Heggoy Teaching Award, History Graduate Students Association, 2008; and the Albert Christ-Janer Award, UGA Research Foundation, Creative Research in the Humanities Award, 2010. He belongs to Phi Eta Sigma, Phi Alpha Theta and Phi Kappa Phi.