Kyriakoudes Gives Keynote Lecture at Global American South Symposium

Dr. Louis Kyriakoudes, associate professor of history at The University of Southern Mississippi, gave the prestigious keynote Alfred Dupont Chandler, Jr. Lecture to open the 2012 Global American South Symposium April 21 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

His presentation, titled "Three 'Great Migrations' That Have Transformed the Rural South, 1840-2000," explored three major population movements that shaped and transformed the rural South: the movement of African-Americans into the trans-Appalachian South, first as slaves and then as sharecroppers and agricultural laborers, in the 19th century; the migration of rural southerners to the region's cities in the 20th century, and the arrival of immigrants into the rural South at the end of the 20th century.

Kyriakoudes also serves as director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at Southern Miss. He specializes in the social and economic history of the 19th and 20th-century U. S. and is the author of The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930. In 1997 he received the Mississippi Humanities Council's Outstanding Humanities Teacher Award.