Spencer B. King, Jr., Center for Southern Studies

01/29/2026

MACON, Ga. — Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will award the 2026 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature to poet and author Kevin Young. The prize will be…

01/28/2025

https://den.mercer.edu/center-for-southern-studies-to-award-2025-thomas-robinson-prize-to-award-winning-author-jill-mccorkle/

Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will award the 2025 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature to award-winning author Jill McCorkle.

04/21/2024

Doug Thompson is doing important work to document Mercer's history and the legacy of slavery.

Around the country, colleges and universities are beginning to work through their historical relationships to the institution of slavery. Sometimes the history is well documented, even if ignored. In other cases, the connection between higher learning and slavery requires some detective work.

02/21/2024

Rita Dove will be presented the Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature this Friday at 6:00 pm in the Presidents Dining Room.

In her new series of poems, Rita Dove focuses on a “witness” -- the Statue of Liberty -- who “is looking out over the world that we live in, wondering how we...

02/12/2024

I am thrilled to present the Robinson Prize to Rita Dove.

MACON — Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will award the 2024 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature to former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove.

01/16/2024

MACON — Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will welcome Dr. Regina Baker for the sixth Laurie Byington Lecture on the Contemporary South on Jan. 18. Dr.

02/15/2023

https://den.mercer.edu/center-for-southern-studies-to-award-2023-thomas-robinson-prize-to-percival-everett/

Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies will award the 2023 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature to renowned novelist and storyteller Percival Everett.

09/30/2022

https://den.mercer.edu/dartmouth-professor-dr-melanie-taylor-to-deliver-65th-annual-lamar-lectures/

Dr. Melanie Benson Taylor MACON – Dr. Melanie Benson Taylor, professor of English and Native American studies at Dartmouth College, will deliver three lectures on the theme “The Weird South” for Mercer University’s 65th annual Lamar Lecture Series, the most prominent lecture series on Southe...

09/30/2022

Dom Flemons will give a talk on American music on Thursday, October 6, at 5:00 PM in the University Center. The talk is free and open to the public. He will give a concert that evening at 8:00 pm at Capricorn Studios. The concert requires tickets, which are available here.

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09/27/2022

Melanie Benson Taylor will deliver the Lamar Lectures next week in Presidents Dining Room on The Weird South.

Her lectures ask what does it mean to do “Southern Studies” in a distinctly post-modern, post-regional, post-human moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of anthropocenic time and human-instigated climate disaster in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility – both for apocalypse and for deliverance – in contexts where settler colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality? Reading modern and contemporary literary texts from a variety of racial perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity’s detention within the “weird” web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.

Monday, October 3, at 6:00 pm: The Grave
Tuesday, October 4, at 9:30 am: The Trees
Tuesday, October 4, at 6:00 pm: The Forest

Taylor is Professor of English and Native American studies at Dartmouth College and editor of the journal Native South. The lectures are free and open to the public.

09/19/2022

Michał Choiński will give a lecture titled “Who Wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman? - A Stylometric Study” on Monday, September 26, at 6:00 pm in Presidents Dining Room. Choiński is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and Senior Fulbright Fellow at Yale University.