Personal Statement, Take 2

I changed "Ole Miss" to "University of Mississippi" and a few awkward phrasings and added the last paragraph. This one, obviously, is for the history dept at Texas. Tell me what you think:

I want to write about the effect of the Civil Rights Movement on Southern popular music - not just soul music from Memphis and Muscle Shoals, which has always been read in terms of its relationship to the Movement, but also the effect on country music, Southern rock, and blues. How did the changing perceptions of race, political affiliations, and business opportunities affect the people who made the music and their audiences?

I first became interested in writing about Southern popular music while an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt’s location in Nashville, Tennessee, provided access and exposure to a wide variety of music. I also majored in theater, which sparked my interest in the production of art and culture, and minored in history and sociology, which developed my understanding of culture as a product of systems related to a particular place and time. I also took several classes within the American and Southern Studies department (to my chagrin, there was no minor available at that time), which led me to join the Southern Studies department at the University of Mississippi for my Master’s degree. While at Mississippi, I deepened my knowledge of Southern history, literature, art, and culture. I wrote my thesis on contemporary independent rock band the Drive-By Truckers, focusing on the way in which their music describes the post-Civil Rights Movement South, with its references to historical events, Southern popular culture, and the bands’ own personal experiences. I was particularly interested in their depiction of place – their hometown of Muscle Shoals, Alabama – and how its history affects their view of modern race and class relations.

After finishing my MA at the University of Mississippi, I wanted a more global perspective on American and Southern history and a chance to live outside the South for while. I chose to pursue an MA in American Studies at King’s College London. At King’s, I wrote about modern visions of 1960s era “country-soul” music, reissued in several compilation series in the late 1990s, and how those albums constitute a rewriting of contemporary Southern race relations. After finishing my work at King’s, I took a position as the Senior Library Assistant for the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi’s main library; I work in the Modern Political Archives on the papers of former U.S. Senator James O. Eastland.

I have been lucky enough in all of my degrees to take classes in a variety of subjects, including history, English, sociology, and documentary studies. As much as I enjoy interdisciplinary work, I have found that I appreciate the academic approach taken by my history classes the most, and that is what I would like to explore in my PhD level studies. For my dissertation work, I would like to draw on my interdisciplinary master’s degrees as well as my experience working in archives, together with a more traditional historical approach, to examine the 1960s and 1970s in the American South through a discussion of the popular music produced in the regions, and how that music reflected and sometimes shaped discussions of race that were so important to the period.

I think that the History Department at the University of Texas in Austin would be an excellent place for me to pursue my ideas. There are a number of professors I would like to work with who teach classes and publish on the American South, race, and the Civil Rights Movement, like Tiffany Gill, Laurie Green, Jacqueline Jones, and Juliet Walker. There are also several professors who work with popular culture and music, like Leonard Moore and Richard Pells. I am particularly interested in working with Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller; I admire his work and have found it useful in shaping some of my own projects. The department has offered many classes in the past few years that I would have loved to have taken, like World Impact of U.S. Mass Culture and Modernity and the U.S. South. I appreciate that the history department offers teaching assistant opportunities, as I would like to develop my skills there and hope that I would be considered for an assistantship. I also think that living in the city of Austin, with its extensive music scene, would also be helpful in developing my ideas. I would love to pursue any opportunities to learn from people working within the music industry there. I think that I could provide a unique voice in the history department; while I do not have an MA in history like many other applicants, I do have two in the field of cultural studies, which has included taking history classes and working with history professors. I have experience living and working in the American South, as well as studying it academically. I lived and studied outside the U.S. for a year, and I have worked at the Archives and Special Collections at the University of Mississippi, which contains major collections on music, politics, and race relations in Mississippi and the rest of the U.S. South. I think I would make an excellent PhD candidate in American history at the University of Texas in Austin. I hope you will consider my application, and I thank you for your time.