UM Graduate Dissertation Receives Top Award

St. George Tucker Society Honors Jay Langdale for ‘Superfluous Southerners’
CONTRIBUTED BY ANDREW COLLEGE
Assistant Professor of History and Coordinator of the Social Science Division, Jay Langdale Ph.D., recently had the revised manuscript of his doctoral dissertation titled Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South published by the University of Missouri Press. The St. George Tucker Society awarded it the 2006 M.E. Bradford Dissertation Prize, an annual competition that recognizes the best dissertation written on any aspect of the American South.
Superfluous Southerners tells the story of traditionalist conservatism and its boundaries in twentieth-century America. Because this time period encompasses both the rise of the modern conservative movement and the demise of southern regional distinctiveness, it affords an ideal setting both for observing the potentiality of American conservatism and for understanding the fate of the traditionalist “man of letters.” Langdale uses the intellectual and literary histories of John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate–the three principal contributors to the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand–and of their three most remarkable intellectual descendants–Cleanth Brooks, Richard Weaver, and Melvin Bradford–to explore these issues.
Langdale received his MA from the Southern Studies Program at the University of Mississippi and his areas of interest include the American South, American Intellectual History and the role of the “man of letters” in American culture. In addition to Andrew College, Dr. Langdale has taught at the University of Florida and Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk.
Established in 1854, Andrew College is a small, residential, two-year College related to The United Methodist Church and is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Situated in the rural southwest Georgia community of Cuthbert, Andrew College offers the Associate of Art, Associate of Music, and Associate of Science degrees. Within these degrees, Andrew College students can choose from more than 50 programs of study.