Recent Publications

• Dreaming of Dixie: How The South Was Created In American Popular Culture (UNC Press, 2011)
• Editor, Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (Forthcoming, University Press of Florida, 2012)
• Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University Press of Florida, 2003). Winner of the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Award for the best published work in southern women's history by the Southern Association for Women Historians.
• "The South in Mass Culture," Journal of Southern History (August 2009)
• "Branding Dixie: Confederate Consumer Culture, 1890-1930" in Anthony Stanonis ed., Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South (University of Georgia Press, 2008)
• "Confederate Defeat and Cultural Expressions of Memory," in Jenny McLeod ed., Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008)
• "Mississippi's United Daughters of the Confederacy: Benevolence, Beauvoir, and the Transmission of Confederate Culture, 1897-1919" in Martha Swain, Elizabeth Payne, and Marjorie Spruill eds., Mississippi Women of Achievement, Volume II (University of Georgia Press, 2010)
• "Holidays for Heroes of the Lost Cause: Lee, Jackson, and Davis" in Len Travers eds., American Holidays and National Days: A Historical Guide (Greenwood Press, 2006)
• "The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconciliation," in Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscape of Southern Memory (University of Tennessee Press, 2003)
• "The Rise of the United Daughters of the Confederacy," in John Salmond and Bruce Clayton eds., Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities (University Press of Florida, 2003)

Research Interests

New South, southern popular culture, museum studies.  Follow my blog on the South in pop culture. 

Courses Taught

• HIST 1161, US History II
• HIST 2000, Southern Culture on the Skids
• HIST 2000, Intro to Museums and Historic Sites
• HIST 2000, History & the World Wide Web
• HIST 3000, Southern Women's History
• HIST 3000, 19th Century US Social/Cultural History
• HIST 4600/5000 The South in the American Imagination
• HIST 4000/5000, Civil War in History and Memory
• HIST 3215, Southerners
• HIST 4300, Intro to Public History
• HIST 6000, New South
• HIST 6310, History Museums and Historic Sites
• HIST 6330, History in the Digital Age
• HIST 6390, Collections Management

Biography

Education
Ph.D., University of Southern Mississippi, 1997

Current Projects
My most recent project investigates the 1932 murder of Jane Surget Merrill, a descendant of the planter aristocracy in Natchez, Mississippi, popularly known as the "Goat Castle murder." The story provides a unique opportunity to study the development of race relations in the post-Emancipation South, the influence of Jim Crow on southern justice, and of the Old South in the American imagination of the 1930s.

I am also editing a book on tourism and southern history.  In addition to teaching and writing, I founded the graduate program in public history.