OXFORD, Miss. – A group of Mississippi scholars will discuss the impact of Internet communications on the tradition of letter-writing and the prospect that priceless documents will be lost to future historians and biographers Monday (April 9) at the University of Mississippi.
The program, hosted by the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, is set for 11 a.m. in the Overby Center Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.With the public increasingly resorting to emails and other forms of quick messages, there is a fear that many longer, thoughtful exchanges that have been invaluable to researchers will no longer be written.
“Working in an archive, I am struck daily with the importance of letters and general correspondence,” said Jennifer Ford, head of Archives and Special Collections at the university’s J.D. Williams Library. “These letters convey the hopes and dreams of the individual. With the onset of technology we are losing this form of communication and losing our history.”
The event will be moderated by Ford, who compiled and edited a collection of mid-19th century correspondence to create the book “The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony: The Civil War Letters of Lt. William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi.”
She will be joined on the panel by Suzanne Marrs, professor of English at Millsaps College who edited “What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell”; John Neff, a Civil War scholar who is an Ole Miss associate professor of history and director of the Center for Civil War Research; and Jay Watson, UM professor of English who holds the Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies and has been researching the literary career of the late Larry Brown.
For more information or for assistance related to a disability, call 662-915-1692.