The Lived Theology and Race Workgroup
Susan Glisson
Assistant Professor in Southern Studies and Director of the Institute on Racial Reconciliation (University of Mississippi). B.A. Christianity and History (Mercer University); M.A. Southern Studies (University of Mississippi); Ph.D. American Studies (College of William and Mary).
While pursuing her Master's, Glisson concentrated on history, religion, and sociology of the 19th and 20th century South. Her thesis examined the roots of radicalism in the Southern Baptist Convention through the work of Clarence Jordan, a Southern Baptist minister who founded the interracial cooperative farm Koinonia in southwest Georgia in 1942. Her major areas of focus during her Doctoral work included women's history, African-American history and Southern studies, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her dissertation, which will be published by the University of Kentucky Press, examines the feminized and racialized leadership of the labor and civil rights movements, in an effort to identify more productive and healthy strategies for conducting social change.
As Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Professor Glisson directed the only deep-south public forum for the President's Initiative on Race, out of which grew the University of Mississippi's Institute for Racial Reconciliation. As interim director of that entity, Glisson advises student groups in the state seeking to promote dialogue and social action in race relations, as well as oversees two pilot projects in community development and reconciliation in the Mississippi Delta.
Professor Glisson live in Oxford, MS where she is active in several civic groups and serves on the board of Citizens for Responsible Development (CRD). She has just been asked to be on the new Oxford mayor's Race Relations Task Force and is creating a statewide racial reconciliation alliance in the wake of the Mississippi state flag vote. She attends services at St. Peter's Episcopal Church.