Undergraduate Education Overview, Mission, and Learning Outcomes

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester – Spring 2010 Courses

Current and Past Semester Courses – Fall 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



John Biewen directs the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies, where he teaches and produces documentary work for NPR, Public Radio International, and other audiences. His reporting and documentary work has taken him across the United States and to Europe, Japan, and India. He covered the Rocky Mountain West for NPR News, and then he spent eight years as a correspondent with American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media. His work has won many honors, including two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards for Outstanding Coverage of the Disadvantaged and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award. Biewen teaches undergraduates and continuing education students in the Certificate in Documentary Studies programs at CDS.





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 creative 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.





Alex Harris
aharris@duke.edu



Alex Harris is a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies and of DoubleTake Magazine. He 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 The Idea of Cuba (2007). His photographs are in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Harris is collaborating with the socio-biologist E.O. Wilson on a book set in Mobile, Alabama, that focuses on the role of place in the life of the individual and of the broader society. He is also photographing housing and living conditions across North Carolina for a book that will connect his contemporary photographs and observations with images he produced on the same theme in the early 1970s. As a teacher, Harris helped to launch the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program at Duke and is currently teaching documentary writing and photography fieldwork seminars through CDS and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Harris is an expert on color digital printing and emphasizes the latest digital technology to produce color prints in some of his classes. Harris co-directs the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, a year-long postgraduate fellowship program based at the Center for Documentary Studies in which recent Duke graduates work with NGOs and humanitarian organizations focused on marginalized families and 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 (LTP), 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. Hyde is also one of the leaders of LTP Arusha, a DukeEngage initiative that is part of an effort to work with teachers in Arusha, Tanzania, to build an LTP program. She teaches a course on Literacy Through Photography that deals with children’s self-expression and with race and gender issues within education. Hyde 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 James, an Emmy-award-winning independent filmmaker, was named an artist-in-residence instructor/filmmaker at Duke University in 2006. That year he received three Emmy nominations for his work as writer and director on the PBS series Slavery and the Making of America, and he was awarded an Emmy for his work as series producer. The following year he conceptualized, produced, and directed The Doll, a dramatic short film based on a story by Charles W. Chesnutt which has screened at film festivals around the world, including the Pan African International Film Festival in Cannes, France. Most recently, James wrote and directed Harlem in Montmartre for PBS’s Great Performances. The documentary, which tells the story of the jazz age in Paris between 1920 and 1945, explores an abandoned but crucial aspect of the African American cultural experience and its effect on the international stage.

Earlier in his career James worked with his friend and mentor, Henry Hampton, founder and executive producer of Blackside Films, which is best known for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize. For Blackside, James executive produced This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys. He also produced and directed films for the PBS series America’s War on Poverty and The Great Depression. Both series were awarded the Silver Baton, Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award.

James was recognized as a distinguished alumnus by Grand Valley State University in 1994, and in December 2007 the university awarded him a Doctorate of Humane Letters. He has also earned a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Duke University.

In 2010, James will turn his creative efforts to the production of an independent feature film, which will be shot in Detroit and in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Nancy Kalow
eneyekay@yahoo.com



Nancy Kalow (http://documentarystartshere.blogspot.com) 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 (http://www.folkstreams.net/film,89), 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 (http://www.archive.org/details/kalow_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 is director of the Pauli Murray Project at the Duke Human Rights Center, an effort to activate history for social change inspired by the life and legacy of activist, poet, lawyer and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray. From 1999 to 2009, she directed community documentary projects at the Center for Documentary Studies. In that position she led nationally recognized documentary programs for youth and the documentary/public art project Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life. Lau has more than twenty years of professional experience as a folklorist, oral historian, teacher, curator, radio producer, and arts consultant. She earned a B.A. in sociology/urban studies from Washington University in St. Louis (1980) and an M.A. in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2000).





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 was 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.





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 contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Normal School and a consulting editor at Southern Cultures. His work has also appeared in The Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and several other magazines and newspapers. 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. Murrell has also written about immigration, 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 people living in the rural South. 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. “Speaking of words, few essayists put them together any better.” (The Chicago Tribune)






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 and writer whose past projects include What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (with co-editor Geoff Dyer) and the best-selling memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s. 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 Photography in Context: Photographic Meaning and the Duke Photography Archive. “Given the centrality of photography in our culture,” she explains, “it seems increasingly important to examine the assumptions that govern our understanding of the medium. In this course, students will analyze bodies of photographic work, taking into consideration their own response to the images, the historical moment in which the pictures were made, the personal history and artistic sensibility of the photographer, the tools of the medium, and the ways in which all of these factors come together to create a meaningful depiction of the world.” Currently, Sartor’s own work, as a writer and a photographer, focuses on her family and childhood home of Monroe, Louisiana.





Lisa Satterwhite
lisa.satterwhite@duke.edu



Lisa Satterwhite, an artist and biologist, holds a B.A. in fine art, a M.S. in zoology (University of Tennessee), and a Ph.D. in cell biology (Johns Hopkins University). While a cancer research fellow at Princeton University, she studied photography in the Program for Visual Arts, and since that time has used photography and basic research to tackle issues of health inequity and social justice. Her current photography explores cultural erasure from unrestricted land development in the mountains of North Carolina and depicts a sense of belonging and stewardship. An ongoing series of interviews and portraits about the recent presidential election reveal a pattern of community, survival, and unrelenting optimism. In her research she is creating transgenic zebrafish to assess whether agricultural pesticides cause birth defects in children of migrant workers. She uses oral history to map incidence of neurodegenerative disease in local agricultural communities. She has taught widely in both fine art and biology at the university level. Her goal is to use teaching and research to heal disconnections between modern societal structure and the health of ecosystems that sustain us.





Christopher Sims
csims@duke.edu



Christopher Sims has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and, at CDS, has coordinated the exhibition and awards programs. He currently designs the CDS Web site. His most recent exhibitions include shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His recent project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. He is represented by Ann Stewart Fine Art in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C.

His work on the Web can be seen at http://www.christopherwsims.com.

Sam Stephenson
sfs4@duke.edu



Sam Stephenson is a writer and director of the Jazz Loft Project 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). Stephenson is currently directing a multifaceted project about a loft building in Manhattan’s flower district that was a legendary haunt of jazz musicians 1954-1965. 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 has collected more than 300 oral histories of the surviving musicians.  His book, The Jazz Loft Project, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf and CDS in November 2009. He is also working on a biography of Smith for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stephenson, a native of Washington, N.C., has degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. His teaching interests include narrative and documentary aspects of underground New York City and vernacular music and culture.

Orion Teal



Orion Teal is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Duke University, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. political, civil rights, and labor history. His dissertation, “Building a Better World: Youth, Political Culture, and the Geography of the New York Left, 1945-65,” examines how radicals in the city attempted to pass on their values to the next generation during the era of McCarthyism. The project relies heavily on oral histories with so-called “Red Diaper Babies,” young people raised in left-wing families. Teal was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California. He received a B.A. in history from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.





Charlie Thompson
cdthomps@duke.edu



Charles Thompson, director of the undergraduate program at CDS, holds the faculty position of Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion. He holds a Ph.D. in religion and culture from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies and Latin American studies. His particular interests in documentary work fall into the categories of oral history, ethnography, filmmaking, and community activism. A former farmer, he remains immersed in agricultural issues and the laborers within our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers. He is the author or editor of four books. His latest book is The Old German Baptist Brethren: Faith, Farming, and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge. He is editor, with Melinda Wiggins, of The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Thompson is also the producer/director two documentary films: The Guestworker and We Shall Not Be Moved. He is currently finishing a documentary film on Guatemalan day laborers in the U.S., Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos, and is also at work on a book about moonshine and small farmers in Appalachia in the 1930s.





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 was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has been photographing and writing about the relationship between man and nature since he received a zoology degree from Duke University in 1990. He served for five years as an artist-in residence at Appalshop, Inc., a media arts center located in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. After receiving his M.F.A. in photography from Yale in 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Sakier Prize for photography. Since then, his work has been exhibited internationally and received reviews in The Village Voice, New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. Whetstone, who teaches in the Art Department of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for a body of work titled New Wilderness. In 2008, he was awarded the Factor Prize for Southern Art.





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.


Mike Wiley (Spring 2010 and Fall 2010)
Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Formerly of Theatre IV and Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, Mike Wiley has more than twelve years of credits in theater for young audiences, plus film, television, and regional theater. An Upward Bound alum and Trio Achiever Award recipient, he is an M.F.A. graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A gifted playwright and actor, Wiley’s overriding goal is expanding cultural awareness for audiences of all ages through dynamic portrayals based on pivotal moments in African American history and, in doing so, helping to unveil a richer picture of the total American experience. Sought by performing arts centers large and small and by educators from middle schools to universities, Wiley’s work will also be featured in the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival. He has been jury-selected for professional industry showcases by both the Midwest Arts Federation and Southern Arts Federation. His expanding rich repertoire of original productions each display his acclaimed ability for bringing to life multiple intertwined characters, with Wiley often portraying more than two dozen persons in a single “one-man” drama. His work includes Blood Done Sign My Name; Life Is So Good; Tired Souls: The Montgomery Bus Boycott; Dar He: The Story of Emmett Till; Jackie Robinson: A Game Apart; Brown v. Board of Education: Over Fifty Years Later; and One Noble Journey: A Box Marked Freedom.

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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.