The SFA is an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Funding for the SFA comes, primarily, from member and corporate contributions. The University of Mississippi pays the salary of our oral historian.
The SFA is working to establish a curriculum of foodways classes, offered within Southern Studies. The SFA seeks funding to establish a dedicated professor of foodways or a joint appointment with another department. In 2011, we took a great leap forward when historian Dr. Jill Cooley, our first post-doctoral fellow to campus, began teaching undergraduate and graduate students here.
The SFA underwrites assistantships each year. Among graduate students who have completed the program and published their thesis is Georgeanna Milam Chapman, who wrote of Craig Claiborne, the Mississippi-born food editor of the New York Times.
We also stage an annual lecture series. Start-up funds for the series were provided by Viking Range, the SFA’s first corporate donor. Past lecturers have included novelist Monique Truong, non-fiction writer Bich Nguyen, and historian James McWilliams.