Jodi Skipper

University of Mississippi, Sociology & Anthropology, Department Member

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I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. My research seeks to understand how historic preservation projects might play a role in imagining more sustainable and healthy futures for U.S. southern communities. During my time at the University of Mississippi, I've worked with Behind the Big House, a slave dwelling interpretation program in Mississippi, which expanded to the state of Arkansas. In 2017, I was awarded one of eight Whiting Foundation Public Humanities fellowships to help expand the program model. With that fellowship, I developed behindthebighouse.org, a website designed to help make the program model more accessible to individuals and institutions thinking through how they might incorporate slavery into historic site narratives. I co-edited (with Michele Coffey) the book Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a US Region (2017) and recently published an autoethnography, Behind the Big House: Reconciling, Slavery, Race and Heritage in the U.S. South with the University of Iowa Press’s Humanities and Public Life Series.

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Matt Karp

Princeton University

Mark L. Thompson

University of Groningen

Marc Champagne

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

Carlos Fabião

Universidade de Lisboa

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Stacey Camp

Michigan State University

Alfredo González-Ruibal

Independent Researcher

Andrew Wilson

University of Oxford

Alexander Fantalkin

Tel Aviv University

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Books by Jodi Skipper

Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the liv... more When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper also seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.

Papers by Jodi Skipper

Review: <i>Terror & Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement</i>, by Steven A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet

Public historian/The Public historian, Feb 1, 2024

Diasporic Kings and Queens: Lafayette's Black Mardi Gras Performances in Historical and Hemispheric Contexts

The Southern Quarterly, Jul 1, 2015

In 2012, David Wharton, director of documentary studies at the University of Mississippi's Center... more In 2012, David Wharton, director of documentary studies at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, and I began to consider a documentary photography project on historically black Mardi Gras celebrations in Louisiana's Acadiana region. Wharton had been photographing rural celebrations (more specifically white Cajun) in the region for several years. As a Lafayette native, I grew up participating in Mardi Gras events in both Lafayette and St. Martin parishes. We both realized the potential of examining the festival practices of seldom documented black populations. After making several contacts, in 2013 we documented Lafayette Mardi Gras Festival (LMGF) Inc.'s ball, pageant, and parade through still photography and oral interviews. Based on that work, this article explores the development and function of this Carnival institution established to meet the needs of Lafayette's local black community. It presents the historical and social contexts of the organization's development in a segregated South, and then frames the current functions of its pageant/ball and parade traditions as performance. Public performance studies are rooted in dramaturgical perspectives, which evidence Shakespeare's metaphor of the whole world as a stage. These studies emphasize how people negotiate everyday interactions through carefully managed social performances. Public performances "are more than entertainment, more than didactic or persuasive formulations, and more than cathartic indulgences" (MacAloon 1). They tell us about how people identify themselves.

Jodi Skipper

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Papers by Jodi Skipper

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