Researching the History of the Southern Conference on British Studies
- Charles Upchurch
- 53 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Observing something can change it, as I was reminded after agreeing to write the history of the Southern Conference on British Studies (SCBS). I did not think that I was the most qualified person to do this, but I turned out to be the most willing. Also important was that the project aligned with my desire to begin a tradition of SCBS Past Presidents completing “exit projects.” After serving as the SCBS Vice President (responsible for our annual conference) and SCBS President (responsible for most everything else), the office of SCBS Past President -- which I will hold for a few more weeks -- has been wonderfully free of specific duties, and also a point from which new initiatives could be undertaken from a place of experience.
My investigation of SCBS history began with a few stories I had heard during my years as a part of the group. Many of them related to something that had long been (and continued to be) a point of controversy. For reasons no one I had spoken to could explain, the SCBS had always met in conjunction with the Southern Historical Association (SHA). This was popular with many members of the SCBS, especially those who taught at institutions that offered funding to attend only one conference a year. For one price they could have the benefits of attending both a large and a small conference (the SHA Annual Meeting draws well over 1,000 participants every year, and includes a substantial book fair). The arrangement is also beneficial to the SCBS officers, who do not have to make independent hotel bookings for the SCBS Annual Conference, and to SCBS presenters, whose panels are listed in the SHA program, leading to greater exposure and larger audiences for their work. This arrangement, nevertheless, has caused tension between the SCBS and the NACBS, as the SHA often meets within a few weeks of the NACBS (and sometimes on the same weekend), leading, it has been argued, to lower participation at the NACBS Annual Meeting from historians from the southern region. I first became active in the SCBS in a period of increasing pressure on the SCBS to break with the SHA.
The other issue from SCBS history that had once generated lots of talk has faded in its relevance. That issue centered on a one-time rival to the SCBS, The Carolinas Symposium on British Studies. The Carolinas Symposium had been run by two British historians based out of Appalachian State University, and for a time, by all accounts, it was far more popular among British historians in the south than was the SCBS. The Carolinas Symposium was founded in the mid-1970s, when the SCBS was perceived as a “closed shop” (many people I spoke to used that exact phrase) dominated by a few individuals who limited both the number of papers presented, and (so it was said) drew only on their friends and graduate students to present them. The Annual Meeting of the Carolinas Symposium, primarily run by Sheldon Hanft, offered a much wider range of papers and presenters. His colleague Michael Moore ran Albion, the academic journal associated with the symposium. Hanft and Moore arrived at Appalachian State University in the early 1970s and the first meetings of the Carolinas Symposium were held there. Later meetings were held at institutions like UNC Charlotte (1989) and Duke University (1992). The Carolinas Symposium was remembered by many as the center of British Studies in the south throughout the 1980s, but that began to change in the 1990s. The energy and resources that Hanft and Moore put into the group remained central to its success; continuation of the conference and the journal after their retirement was an open question. Also, throughout the 1990s, there was a sense that new leadership within the SCBS was successfully correcting the shortcomings of that organization.
Among the scholars who opened up the SCBS, the best-remembered was Charles Perry, for whom the SCBS Graduate Student Paper Prize is named. Perry, who had served as the president of the Carolinas Symposium from 1983 to 1985, became president of the SCBS twenty years later. Also remembered as working to open up the SCBS as far back as the 1980s was Barbara Schnorrenberg, who was described by more than one interviewee as an “independent scholar.” This description, coming from more than one source, would give me pause, after I recovered a letter written in 1966 by Prof. Charles Ritcheson. Ritcheson was a professor at Southern Methodist University and Chair of the Exploratory Committee charged with founding the Southern Conference on British Studies. He wrote to Schnorrenberg, who was then a professor at UNC, to invite her to an organizational meeting to set up the Southern Conference on British Studies, “to coincide with the Southern Historical Association session in Memphis next November.” That Schnorrenberg might be later remembered as an “independent scholar” despite having being a professor at one of the most important southern universities and a founding member of the SCBS made me question (to a greater degree than I had previously) the veracity of the stories I was collecting. And yet, for many months, such stories seemed to be the primary material on which I could draw. The stories I was told did not always align with one another, but there did seem to be a consensus on some points, including that a “generational shift” occurred within the SCBS around 2005 or 2006. This was also the period during which the Carolinas Symposium merged with the SCBS, and when the journal Albion merged with the Journal of British Studies.
Without an archive to draw on, my methodology for gathering information consisted of emailing the SCBS membership en masse and contacting the former SCBS Presidents individually, asking for interviews and extant SCBS documents. With their help I recreated the list of SCBS Presidents, and recovered many of the conference programs for the past two decades. Ultimately, I did make contact with Charles Perry, who was very generous with his time. In an extended phone interview, he was able to provide significant new information, confirming and elaborating on many of the events about which I previously had only fragmentary details. And then, near the end of the interview, he dropped something of a bombshell. Perry was the first past president to mention that there was an SCBS Archive, in the Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill. A quick catalogue search confirmed that this archive existed, and that it contained material spanning the years 1966 to 2007.
Suddenly, my project became very different. It was no longer about piecing together anecdotes and deciding which ones seemed most credible; there was now a large body of source material that needed to be accessed, analyzed, and contextualized to do justice to the project. A much more professional history of the SCBS was suddenly possible. I had interviewed Perry while I was in the middle of a summer residency at the Lewis Walpole Library, and would have just a few weeks between the end of that fellowship and the start of a semester teaching in London. I arranged to fly to Chapel Hill, not only to examine the materials in the archive but also to speak with the Special Collections Librarians there about bringing the archive up to date. The trip was facilitated by my niece, Lilith Bray, who provided transportation and last-minute research assistance. Together we photographed a significant portion of the material, and read what we could on the spot with the time we had.
One of the most interesting things we found was an answer to the question of when the SCBS began meeting with the SHA, something that not even Charles Perry could tell me. As indicated above, the meeting where the SCBS was organized was held in conjunction with a meeting of the SHA. The SCBS was discussed as a supplement to the European History Section of the SHA (to this day, the SCBS and the European History Section still hold a joint reception at the SHA/SCBS meetings). A representative of the Conference on British Studies (not yet the North American Conference on British Studies) was present at the first SCBS meeting, held in conjunction with the SHA. The earliest documents in the archive discuss the drafting of the first by-laws of the SCBS, and also a “constitutional crisis” [as it was described in the document] within the CBS. At the time, in the mid-1960s, it was the CBS that was thought to be a “closed shop”, dominated by a handful of institutions in the northeast. The organization that would later be called the NACBS wanted to create regional affiliates, and give them a formal place in the governing structure of the CBS. The SCBS was formed out of this process, by a group of British historians who already had connections with the SHA. This put the contemporary struggles to separate the SCBS from the SHA in a new light.
This newly recovered information about the depth of the connection between the SCBS and the SHA suggests the importance of maintaining that alliance, although the pressure for separation has subsided in recent years, for two main reasons. One is the work of Michael de Nie, one of the most active SCBS presidents of the twenty-first century, who set out to influence the discussion when it was most intense by inviting the NACBS President, Anna Clark, to speak at the SCBS Annual Meeting, so that she could experience the SCBS Conference first-hand, and better understand how well our relationship with the SHA served our members.
The second reason for the lessening of the debate is the success of the SCBS model in adapting to recent shifts within the profession. In recent years, the NACBS opened a dialogue with the regional organizations, as some struggled with the difficulties of running annual regional conferences. In the meetings of regional presidents, some of which I attended, issues associated with putting on a stand-alone regional conference with relatively modest financial and manpower resources were discussed. It was also observed at one meeting that the costs of attending a regional conference approached that of attending a national one, and this was a factor, some felt, in reduced attendance numbers. One result of this process was that the NACBS offered financial subsidies to the regionals.
In these discussions, it was observed that the SCBS model kept costs down, administrative duties light, and attendance robust. It was also noted that the SCBS model, of partnering with another organization, also addressed another issue being discussed by the NACBS at the time, that of expanding the audience for British Studies.
Knowing the historical roots of the SCBS’s connection to the SHA makes it less likely that the relationship will be severed in the future. The SCBS has demonstrated that it can fulfill all its duties to both organizations, and be all the stronger for it.
Attempting to fulfill the request of the NACBS to write this brief history of the SCBS has helped to preserve that history. As I learned in my discussions with the archivists at the Wilson Library, the SCBS materials are currently held on loan, rather than as a gift. Items held on loan are subject to being deaccessioned, receive limited attention in relation to digitization and other aspects of collection accessibility, and are not considered for ongoing updates. To ensure the retention and expansion of SCBS Archive, the SCBS has worked out an agreement to make our archive a gift to the Wilson Library, and to regularly update it in six-year cycles, timed to the terms of our officers, so the memory of our archive, and the process for updating it, does not lapse again. This plan has been shared with the SCBS membership, and we will take a vote at the November 2025 SCBS Annual Meeting on whether or not to move forward in this way.
If this plan is approved, it will preserve the ability to write of the definitive history of the SCBS, which this article is not. The discovery of the SCBS Archive late in the research process, and close to the deadline for completing this article before the upcoming NACBS Annual Meeting, made it impossible to write in the way the new sources required. There was not sufficient time to synthesize the documents, verify the accounts given, and contextualize the material. Rather than present a polished surface based on a superficial reading which might discourage future fuller investigations, I am choosing instead to use the limited time that I do have (as I sit in the British Library writing this, neglecting my research, but not my students) to highlight the possibilities of the history that might be written, to share the results of the investigations that I was able to carry out, and to do the needed work to sustain the collections that will preserve ability to write a more complete history of the SCBS.
Charles Upchurch is a Professor of British history at Florida State University, and his research focuses on gender and sexuality in the nineteenth century. His second book, “Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, was published 2021 by Temple University Press, and recounts the previously untold story of the parliamentary effort to end the death penalty for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. His first book, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform, explores the ways in which family and class influenced the interpretation of same-sex desire in the period between 1820 and 1870. He has served as a Distinguished Academic Patron of LGBT History Month in the United Kingdom, and as the President of the Southern Conference on British Studies.
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