Oxford Symposium on the History of Music Education

The Oxford Symposium on the History of Music Education will meet at the University of Mississippi in Oxford from Wednesday, June 3 – Saturday, June 6, 2020.

Oxford Symposium—Keynote Speakers

Elizabeth Anne Payne, Professor Emerita of History in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History at the University of Mississippi, taught women’s history, religion, and courses in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American history. She holds a Master of Theology from Perkins School of Theology Southern Methodist University and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She taught at Northwestern University and the University of Arkansas, where she also directed the honors college. In 1997, she moved to the University of Mississippi and became the founding director of the McDonnell-Barksdale Honors College.

Dr. Payne wrote Reform, Labor and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Woman’s Trade Union League, and co-edited Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, Volumes I and II. She also edited Writing Women’s History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott, a collection of essays of eminent scholars of women’s history influenced by Scott’s A Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930. A native Mississippian, Payne with her graduate students interviewed over one hundred women in Union County, Mississippi, and produced Makin’ Do, a documentary portraying the lives of women who came of age before World War II. She presently works on the life of Myrtle Terry Lawrence, a white sharecropper who became an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in 1936.

Charles Reagan Wilson was the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1981-2014. He worked extensively with graduate students and served as Director of the Southern Studies academic program from 1991 to 1998, and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998-2007. Wilson received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas Tech University before coming to Oxford. Wilson is the author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (1980), a study of the memory of the Confederacy in the post-Civil War South, Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1995), which studies popular religion as a part of the culture of the modern South, and Flashes of Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U. S. South (2011). He is also coeditor (with Bill Ferris) of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as best reference book of the year and is also general editor of the 24-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2006-2013). He is editor or coeditor of Religion and the American Civil War (1998), The New Regionalism (1996), and Religion in the South (1985).