Undergraduate Education Overview, Mission, and Learning Outcomes

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester – Fall 2009 Courses

Current and Past Semester Courses – Spring 2009 Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Documentary Studies Courses and Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS




Instructors

Kelly Alexander
kellyalexander9@hotmail.com



Kelly Alexander is a writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is a consulting editor to Saveur magazine and the author of numerous feature stories for that publication. Her article “Hometown Appetites,” an homage to the great American food writer Clementine Paddleford, won the James Beard Journalism Award and will be the basis for a biography and cookbook to be published by Penguin in fall 2007. Prior to joining Saveur, Alexander worked as the restaurant editor of Microsoft’s New York Sidewalk and as an assistant editor at Food & Wine magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. Last year her story “Multicultural Meat,” about the cross-cultural significance of brisket, was nominated for a Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Alexander is also a regular contributor on the subject of food to the NPR program “The State of Things,” which airs daily on WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, creative writing, and anthropology.





John Biewen
jbiewen@duke.edu



During an eighteen-year career, American RadioWorks Correspondent-Producer John Biewen has produced a large body of documentary work for NPR and Public Radio International programs. He harvested onions with migrant farm workers in south Texas, followed Navajo youth gangs in Arizona, and documented the lives of ex-inmates in North Carolina. He reported on Tokyo's changing youth culture and the practice of euthanasia in Holland. In 1997–98, Biewen covered the Rocky Mountain West as a staff reporter for NPR. His recent awards include two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards (2000, 2001), the Public Service Award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2002), and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award (2002). Biewen graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, with a degree in philosophy.  In 1985–87 he lived and taught in Osaka, Japan.





Lisa Ellis
lisaelliseason@gmail.com



Lisa Ellis, a documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, has degrees from Harvard University (A.B.) and Columbia College (M.F.A). Her thesis film, Hopkins Park, IL, is a short documentary profiling an impoverished, rural African American town in Illinois where a correctional facility is slated to be built. The episodic film delves into the life histories of three residents and shows the resilience of the local population despite a history of discrimination, while helping us to understand their diversity of views on potential impacts of a prison. Her short “Homemade,” which profiles a lesbian couple as they try to have a baby, was featured on PBS Image Union. Ellis has taught short form documentary and screenwriting courses at the university level for ten years. Recurring subjects in her documentary and fiction work have been the matriarch and identity.






Wendy Ewald
wendyewald@aol.com



Wendy Ewald is director of Literacy Through Photography, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies that teaches elementary- and middle-school students to express themselves through photography and writing. A senior research associate at CDS, she has been involved in several special projects for teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. These include Black Self/White Self and American Alphabets, which explore race and ethnicity in America. Ewald has worked as a photographer, teacher, and documentary writer for more than thirty years. She has had exhibitions in major museums in the United States and in Europe. She has published seven books and received many grants and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. At CDS, Ewald teaches the course Literacy Through Photography: Teaching Photography and Writing in Elementary and Middle Schools; she also has been co-teaching a Duke/UNC course on various approaches to documentary photography since Spring 2003. Her book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children, was published by CDS/Lyndhurst Books and Beacon Press in 2001.






Stephanie Grant
grant.stephanie@gmail.com



Stephanie Grant is an award-winning writer and community activist whose work addresses the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her first novel, The Passion of Alice, was published by Houghton Mifflin and was nominated for Britain’s Orange Prize for Women Writers and the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Her most recent novel, Map of Ireland (Scribner, 2008), is set during desegregation in Boston and places female sexuality and friendship at the center of a foundational American myth about race. Her nonfiction writing has focused on issues affecting queer communities and families. In her teaching, Grant is especially interested nonfiction and fiction as distinct methods of bearing witness to contemporary life.





Alex Harris
aharris@duke.edu



Alex Harris, one of the founders of the Center for Documentary Studies, has taught documentary photography and writing at Duke since 1975. Among his books are River of Traps, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in 1991, and A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South. His current work is about contemporary Cuba, aging in America, and the autobiographical impulse in photography. Harris helped to launch the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program at Duke and is currently teaching photographic fieldwork courses related to humanitarian and policy issues. In some courses, such as Advanced Documentary Photography, Harris emphasizes the new digital technology to produce photographs. Harris co-directs the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, a year-long postgraduate fellowship program based at the Center for Documentary Studies. Through the Hine Program recent Duke graduates work with international humanitarian organizations focused on marginalized children. All Hine Fellows complete an in-depth documentary project to benefit the non-governmental organizations and communities with which they work.

Alex Harris's work can be seen on the Web at http://alex-harris.com.





Gary Hawkins
chaircity@usa.net



Gary Hawkins was born and raised in Thomasville, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in fine arts, and the University of Southern California, where he majored in cinema. He joined the directing faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts, in the School of Filmmaking, in 1991 and taught there until 1999. Hawkins has written and directed six films. His second, The Rough South of Harry Crews, won an Emmy and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Gold Award in 1992. The Rough South of Larry Brown, the latest in Hawkins’s on-going series about working-class Southern authors, was picked by The Oxford American as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries and was reviewed by Variety as a “beautifully conceived documentary film.” The Rough South of Larry Brown won Best Feature at the Savannah Film & Video Festival, Best Feature at the Ohio Independent Film Festival, and Best Documentary Feature at the Oxford Film Festival. Hawkins’s screenplay DownTime was selected by The Sundance Institute for the Writer’s Lab in the winter of 2000. Presently Hawkins is adapting two novels into screenplays for Capricorn Films.





Frank Hunter
platpal@earthlink.net



Frank Hunter was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the desert Southwest. He has an M.A. in communications from the University of Colorado and an M.F.A. in photography from Ohio University, where he was the John Cady Graduate Fellow in Fine Art. Hunter has taught at the university level for more than twenty years. His interest in photographic process includes the technical process of exposure and development as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of creating photographic work. Hunter is best known for his landscape photographs done in the nineteenth-century process known as platinum/palladium. His recent work includes a commission done for the Federal Reserve Bank documenting Midtown Atlanta at the turn of the millennium, which was shown at the High Museum in Atlanta in 2003. His work is represented in a number of public and private collections, including the Speed Museum, the Denver Museum of Art, the High Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.





Katie Hyde
kahyde@duke.edu



Katie Hyde is the director of Literacy Through Photography, a program based at the Center for Documentary Studies. In this capacity, she works closely with undergraduate students, community volunteers, and teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. With Wendy Ewald she teaches a course on Literacy Through Photography that deals with children’s self-expression and with race and gender issues within education. She also teaches a course called Sociology Through Photography, using documentary photography as a tool to see the world through a sociological lens. Hyde earned her doctorate in sociology at North Carolina State University. She has explored how social inequalities are constructed, perpetuated, and resisted through fieldwork and other research on recent Latino/a immigration in North Carolina, women’s activism in Russia, and girls’ education in rural Nepal.





Dante James
dante.james@duke.edu



Dante J. James is an award-winning independent filmmaker and artist-in-residence at Duke University. He recently completed a short dramatic film based on the work of Charles W. Chesnutt. Last fall James won an Emmy award for his work as series producer of the critically acclaimed PBS series Slavery and the Making of America; he received a total of three nominations. In 2003, he executive produced the PBS series This Far by Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys. Earlier in his career, James worked with and produced several films for his friend and mentor, the late renowned filmmaker Henry Hampton, founder of Blackside Films. James's next film, a performance documentary for the PBS series Great Performances, will be shot in Paris, France. The film will explore history's influence on the artistic evolution of jazz music in Paris from 1918 to the 1950s. James is a graduate and distinguished alumnus of Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is also a graduate of Duke University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.





Nancy Kalow
eneyekay@yahoo.com



Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker who has taught at CDS since 2000. She attended Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.) and was a Rockefeller Fellow at UNC's University Center for International Studies. She has documented Southern traditional music and material culture, Primitive Baptist preaching and visionary narratives in eastern North Carolina, and the music and religious folklife of the Mexican community in central North Carolina. Two of her video documentaries are online: Sadobabies, winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival, and The Losers Club. She chairs the Selection Committee of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, having served on the committee since 1999.





Max Krochmal
mk63@duke.edu

Max Krochmal is a Ph.D. candidate in American social and political history at Duke University, focusing on labor and civil rights in the twentieth-century South and West.  Oral history research is central to his dissertation project, tentatively titled “The View from the Ground,” which follows the ordinary working-class women and men who organized the African American and ethnic Mexican civil rights movements in Texas, from the peak of “civil rights unionism” in World War II through the next wave of upheaval in the 1960s. Krochmal is also a Center for Documentary Studies Graduate Fellow, serving as research associate for the CDS project Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. Before coming to Duke, he worked as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union in California.





Barbara Lau
balau@duke.edu



Barbara Lau, Community Documentary Projects Director at the Center for Documentary Studies, is a folklorist, curator, and radio producer. At CDS, she coordinates collaborative work with the Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project and oversees the Youth Document Durham and Youth Noise Network projects. Two recent exhibitions are based on her fieldwork with photographer Cedric N. Chatterley in North Carolina’s Cambodian refugee communities. To accompany these exhibitions, she authored an exhibit catalog and co-authored an award-winning children’s book, Sokita Celebrates the New Year: A Cambodian American Holiday. She has an MA in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.





Spencie Love
sl1@duke.edu



After graduating from college Spencie Love worked as a journalist for ten years before going on to complete a Ph.D. in American history at Duke University in 1990. She is the author of One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew, which focuses on twentieth-century race relations and relies heavily on oral history. Before she began teaching at CDS in 2001, she served as Acting and Assistant Director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. She is currently working on two book projects. One deals with family history, focusing on five generations of women, and the other is a study of nonviolence built around the life and teaching of the Rev. James M. Lawson, known as the “nonviolent strategist” of the Civil Rights Movement. Love’s courses include Memories of Home: Family Sagas, which offers students the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews and archival and photography research for their own writing projects.





Roger Lucey
Roger.Lucey@etv.co.za



Roger Lucey is a South African musician, songwriter, and filmmaker. His early music career was curtailed by the apartheid government, precipitating his move to the film industry. He worked as news cameraman/producer during the 1980s and 1990s throughout Southern Africa and later covered events in the rest of Africa and Eastern Europe. More recently he worked as arts editor for South Africa’s largest independent national broadcaster, where he is now director of documentaries. He continues to make music and documentaries on a variety of subjects. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Duke.





Gordon Mantler
gkm2@duke.edu



Gordon Mantler recently finished his doctorate in U.S., African American, and Latino history at Duke University. A fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2007-08, Mantler completed his dissertation, “Black, Brown, and Poor: Martin Luther King Jr., the Poor People’s Campaign, and Its Legacies,” which used King’s last crusade as a vehicle to explore both the potential and the obstacles to inter-ethnic organizing among African Americans and Latinos in the late 1960s and 1970s. Oral history provided an essential source base for the project. Mantler has taught numerous history courses at Duke and at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, including the Civil Rights Movement, Schools and Jim Crow, and U.S. and African American history surveys. For a decade before that, Mantler was a journalist at several daily newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.





John Moses
moses001@mc.duke.edu



John Moses is a primary care pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center. While he was an undergraduate student at Duke, Moses took a photography class from CDS faculty member Alex Harris. Before attending medical school, he spent a year photographing the conditions of migrant farmworkers in the Southeast. His current projects include a book about primary care medicine and a book about children and illness. His courses include Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography, part of the Focus Program, and Children and the Experience of Illness, in which students teach photography to children being treated for illness and write about their experiences during the semester. Of the class, he says, “It has become a way for students to process their own issues with illness.” Moses plans to continue developing other opportunities for undergraduates to work with documentary studies and medicine.




Duncan Murrell
duncan@rattlejar.com



Duncan Murrell is an award-winning writer and journalist from North Carolina. He is a regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine, a contributing editor to The Normal School, and a consulting editor at Southern Cultures. His work has also appeared in Mother Jones, Poets & Writers, The Oxford American, and many other publications. He has been a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. In 2006 he spent eight months living in New Orleans while writing “In The Year of the Storm,” a long work that appeared in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s and prompted a Chicago Tribune critic to write, “Speaking of words, few essayists put them together any better … crucial to an understanding of what catastrophe leaves in its tumbling wake, as seen through one man’s tormented consciousness.” Murrell has also written about termites, vultures, and hogs; he’s written profiles of politicians, most recently General Wesley Clark; and he’s written extensively on the economics and social life of small towns. He is currently at work on a long project for Harper’s on Latino immigration as seen through the eyes of Franciscan friars living in rural North Carolina. Before writing full-time, Murrell was an editor at Algonquin Books, where he acquired and edited several national bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction. He also has worked as a newspaper writer in Alabama and Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Northwestern University.






Steven Petrow
petrow@bluedahlia.net



Steven Petrow, an award-winning journalist and author, has won numerous writing awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution. He has covered the AIDS epidemic for more than two decades and has published four related books: Dancing Against the Darkness: The Story of People with AIDS, Their Friends, Families, and Communities (Lexington, 1990); When Someone You Know Has AIDS (Crown, 1993); Ending the HIV Epidemic (ETR Network, 1990); and The HIV Drug Book (Pocket Books, 1995). In all, he is the author/editor of more than a dozen books, including the best-selling The Essential Book of Gay Manners and Etiquette (HarperCollins, 1995), and his most recent, The Lost Hamptons (Arcadia, 2004). He is currently working on Out of the Box: A Memoir. Petrow started his career at The Wall Street Journal and has since held senior editorial positions at Life Magazine (Time Inc.), HotWired (Wired Magazine), Longevity Magazine (General Media), Fitness Magazine (The New York Times Co.) and Time Inc. New Media. He has published work in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon.com, The Advocate, and Life Magazine. Currently a contributor to the Huffington Post, he is the former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. Petrow holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and an M.A. and C.Phil. from the University of California, Berkeley, all in 20th century cultural and social U.S. history.






Susie Post-Rust
susie@susiepostrust.com



Susie Post-Rust is a veteran magazine and newspaper photojournalist who has spent the last two decades documenting the lives of people in more than twenty countries. Her passion throughout her career has been in-depth documentary projects that reveal small communities and the people who live in them. For more than ten years she worked for National Geographic magazine, while also contributing to Life, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and the New York Times, as well as nonprofit charity groups, including World Vision, the North Carolina Food Bank, Food for the Hungry, and Compassion International. She has an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia and a BSBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1986 she was honored with the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Coverage of the Disadvantaged in recognition of her photographic essay Jerry: A Troubled Mind, the story of one man’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.





Tom Rankin
docstudies@duke.edu



Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies and associate professor of the practice of art and documentary studies at Duke University. A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for more than twenty years. Formerly associate professor of art and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi and chair of the Art Department at Delta State University, he was educated at Tufts University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Georgia State University. A native of Kentucky, he has curated a number of exhibitions and published numerous articles and reviews on photography and Southern culture. His photographs have been published widely in numerous magazines, journals, and books, and he has exhibited throughout the country. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; 'Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre': Photographs of a River Life (1995); Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).





Margaret Sartor
msartor@duke.edu



Margaret Sartor is a photographer, writer, and editor whose past projects include What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney and Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness, which was co-edited with Alex Harris. Her photographs are in many permanent and private collections and have appeared in Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, among other publications. At CDS, Sartor teaches the seminar American Communities: A Photographic Approach. In this course, she explains, “Each student has the responsibility of defining his or her own long-term photographic project, and the unpredictable variety of subject matter creates a unique atmosphere—one of mutual astonishment as well as education. But the idea this class embodies, if any, is the importance of paying attention, of gaining an understanding of the way people live by direct observation and experience.” Currently, Sartor’s own work focuses on her family and childhood home of Monroe, Louisiana.





Lisa Satterwhite
lisa.satterwhite@duke.edu



Lisa Satterwhite, an artist and a biologist, holds a B.A. in fine art and art history and an M.S. in zoology from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in cell biology from Johns Hopkins University. A cancer research fellow at Princeton University, where she studied photography in the Program for Visual Arts, she is interested in ties to the land, human health, and social justice. Her current photographic work documents cultural erasure from unrestricted land development in the mountains and explores sense of place, intimacy, and stewardship of water. In her research she is creating new methods to assess whether agricultural pesticides cause birth defects in children of migrant workers.





Christopher Sims
csims@duke.edu



Christopher Sims, who currently designs the CDS Web site, has coordinated the exhibitions and awards programs at CDS, as well as worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He has an undergraduate degree from Duke, a master’s degree in visual communication from UNC–Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has received a national fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography, was selected for PDN’s Photography Annual "Best Photography of the Year" in 2007 and 2008, and was featured in the book American Photography 20, a collection edited by Kathy Ryan of the New York Times Magazine. He is represented by Ann Stewart Fine Art in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C.





Sam Stephenson
sfs4@duke.edu



Sam Stephenson is a writer and a research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies. Since 1997 his research his focused on the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, and he has published two books on the subject: Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (W. W. Norton in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2001) and W. Eugene Smith, a retrospective of Smith’s career (Phaidon Press, 2001). He also curated a national traveling exhibition of Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Stephenson is currently directing a multifaceted project about a loft building in Manhattan’s flower district that from 1954 to 1964 was a legendary haunt of jazz musicians. Recipient of a 2001–02 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is researching Eugene Smith’s extensive photographs and audiotapes of this jazz loft and collecting oral histories of the surviving musicians. Stephenson, a native of Washington, N.C., has degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. His teaching interests include visual and narrative explorations of the built and natural environments and documentary aspects of jazz history and music.

Kerry Taylor
kerryt@email.unc.edu



Kerry Taylor is a native of Lombard, Illinois. He has taught a variety of classes on oral history, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement. Before returning to graduate school he worked as a newspaper reporter, a community organizer, and an editor at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. He is currently working on his dissertation exploring labor activism in the 1970s.





Charlie Thompson
cdthomps@duke.edu



Charles Thompson, education and curriculum director at CDS, is an adjunct faculty member in the Duke departments of cultural anthropology and religion. He directs the undergraduate program at CDS. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies, ethnography, and Latin American studies. His particular interests in documentary work fall into the categories of oral history, ethnography, and community activism. A former farmer, he remains immersed in agricultural issues and the cultures that surround our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers. His latest book, with Melinda Wiggins, is The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Currently Thompson is researching the history, culture, and agriculture of the Old German Baptist Brethren in the mountains of Virginia. He has also published a book and several articles on Guatemalan Maya refugees.





Timothy Tyson
timothy.tyson@duke.edu



Timothy B. Tyson, author of the much-acclaimed Blood Done Sign My Name and other award-winning books, is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Divinity School. Blood Done Sign My Name, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Christopher Award and the North Caroliniana Book Award, was the 2005 selection of the Carolina Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assigned to all new undergraduate students. Tyson’s previous book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (UNC Press, 1999) won the James Rawley Prize and was co-winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. He also co-edited, with David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (UNC Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Tyson was a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004–05. He is a North Carolina native and a graduate of Duke (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’94).





Jeff Whetstone
jeffwhet@email.unc.edu

Jeff Whetstone, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been photographing and writing about the human relationship to the land since he graduated from Duke University in 1990. In 1991, he traveled the migrant farmworker stream throughout the southeastern United States and in the Rio Grande Valley in Mexico to document the life of a migrant farmworker family as part of a project at the Center for Documentary Studies. A recipient of several Lyndhurst Foundation grants, Whetstone has taught photography and writing workshops throughout the South, including residencies at the Appalachian Media Institute and at Appalshop Inc., a media arts center located in eastern Kentucky. While working at Appalshop, Whetstone served as project director for the exhibit Before the Flood, an oral history project documenting the history of the Watuaga River Valley, which premiered at the National Folk Festival. His photographs and writing have been featured in Southern Changes, DoubleTake, Southern Exposure, and elsewhere. After receiving his M.F.A. in photography from Yale in 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Sakier Prize for photography. Whetstone, a lecturer in the Art and Art History Department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, exhibits his work at Wallspace Gallery and Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery in New York City. He co-teaches a Duke/UNC documentary photography class with Wendy Ewald.





Visiting Instructors


Paul Hendrickson (Fall 2009)
Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
phendric@sas.upenn.edu

Paul Hendrickson’s most recent book, Sons of Mississippi (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune. In addition, it was named by many newspapers to their “Top 10” lists for books published in 2003. The research and writing, which took about five years, were supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2005, Hendrickson worked for thirty years in daily journalism. He was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001. Eventually, he came to understand the truth of the old saying that the legs are the first to go, and that the honorable and difficult business of writing perishable pieces on deadline belonged to younger people. He needed to try to find a place--a home--where he could continue to work on books and the occasional magazine article and to be involved with gifted, creative people. So now, luck beyond dream, fortune beyond hope, he finds himself conducting writing workshops full time at Penn in advanced nonfiction.

The neophyte professor, hardly young anymore, was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: Seminary: A Search. His other books are: Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996). They, too, were published by Knopf.

Hendrickson has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State. He is married and lives with his family (world-class wife, two world-class sons) in Havertown, Pennsylvania. Oh, yes: He’s deep into his next nonfiction book, which has to do with Ernest Hemingway.


Alice Gerrard (Spring 2009)
Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
agerrard@mindspring.com

Alice Gerrard has been documenting music through performance, writing/editing, and film throughout her forty-year career as a traditional musician. Her most notable accomplishments as a documentarian include The Old-Time Herald, a periodical for which she served as founding editor-in-chief from 1987 until 2003, and her film Sprout Wings and Fly.

Gerrard is a talent of legendary status. She has known, learned from, and performed with many of the old-time and bluegrass greats and has in turn earned worldwide respect for her own important contributions to the music.

She is particularly known for her groundbreaking collaboration with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and ’70s. The duo produced four classic LPs (recently reissued by Rounder on CD) and influenced scores of young women singers—even The Judds acknowledge Dickens and Gerrard as an important early inspiration.

Gerrard’s two solo albums, Pieces of My Heart and Calling Me Home, were released on the Copper Creek label in 1995 and 2004, respectively, to critical acclaim in Billboard, Bluegrass Unlimited, New Country, and other publications. These superb recordings showcase Gerrard’s many talents: her compelling, eclectic songwriting; her powerful, hard-edged vocals; and her instrumental mastery on rhythm guitar, banjo, and old-time fiddle.

As a musician, Gerrard has appeared on more than twenty recordings, including projects with many traditional musicians, including Tommy Jarrell, Enoch Rutherford, Otis Burris, Luther Davis, and Matokie Slaughter; as an expert with in-depth knowledge of mountain music, she has produced or written liner notes for a dozen more. She also co-produced and appeared in two documentary films.

A tireless advocate of traditional music, Gerrard has won numerous honors, including an International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Distinguished Achievement Award, a Virginia Arts Commission Award, the North Carolina Folklore Society’s Tommy Jarrell Award, and an Indy Award.

The daughter of trained classical musicians, Alice Gerrard didn’t grow up with bluegrass or folk music. Her earliest musical memories are of singing along with family members and friends around the living room piano. Gerrard’s albums with West Virginia–born folksinger Hazel Dickens, however, rank among the most influential recordings in folk music history.

Gerrard’s first exposure to folk music came while she was attending Antioch College in Ohio. Inspired by the folk songs played by dorm mates, Gerrard abandoned the piano and became absorbed with the more rural sounds that she heard on such albums as The Anthology of American Folk Music. When she moved to Washington, D.C., to complete her college experience, Gerrard encountered a thriving bluegrass scene, where she met numerous bluegrass and old-timey musicians, including Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers, who introduced her to Dickens. She and Dickens soon became frequent performers in the folk clubs and coffeehouses of the Capitol region. Their repertoire continued to expand as they studied sheet music at the Library of Congress and taped old-timey musicians at folk festivals.

Gerrard and Dickens’ debut album, Who’s That Knocking, released in 1965, was recorded for $75 at the First Unitarian Church in Washington and featured accompaniment by David Grisman (mandolin), Lamar Grier (banjo), and Chubby Wise and Billy Baker (fiddles). Their second album, Won’t You Come and Sing?, featuring the same musicians, was recorded the same year, but wasn’t released until 1973. Gerrard and Dickens’ first two albums were later combined and released as Pioneering Women of Bluegrass in 1996.

Gerrard also recorded two albums with Mike Seeger, Mike and Alice Seeger in Concert in 1970 and Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard in 1980.

Gerrard performs and tours regularly with Tom Sauber and Brad Leftwich as Tom, Brad & Alice. She also performs with the Herald Angels and the Harmony Sisters, and very occasionally with Hazel Dickens.

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Untitled, from the series Latino Pastimes—La Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape," taught by Professor Tom Rankin.