Our Centers

Through the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, The University of Southern Mississippi has been collecting and preserving the stories of Mississippians since 1971. This oral history collection now contains well over four thousand interviews, by far the largest in the state and one of the largest in the South. 

The Center for the Study of the Gulf South (CSGS) at The University of Southern Mississippi offers strengths in several critical eras of the American South and Caribbean basin—the colonial Gulf South, slavery and abolition, the Civil War era, and the Civil Rights Movement and other mobilizations for citizenship and equality. 

The Center for Writers is the creative writing program in the School of Humanities at The University of Southern Mississippi. Students work toward M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English with emphases in fiction or poetry. The tone of the program is characterized by a playful rigor with workshops offered in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction by the program's distinguished faculty, all of whom hold doctoral degrees. Additional courses in craft, literary forms, and teaching creative writing are also offered regularly, and students participate in a regular reading series and in the publication of Product, a student-run publication. USM is also home to Mississippi Review, an award-winning literary journal publishing both established writers and new voices as well.

 The Dale Center for the Study of War & Society (DCSW&S) at the University of Southern Mississippi serves as a local, national, and international resource for the study of the history of warfare and its influence on both soldiers and civilians. Our goal is to be the leading national institution in the study of war and society; to attract the top, most productive faculty in the field; to draw the most promising graduate students to the best program in the nation; and to serve the community by providing outreach and educational programming about the study of warfare in all of its facets