An academic journal about the history and cultures of the U.S. South, published by UNC Press.

Southern Cultures welcomes thoughtful submissions year-round on all things southern—from essays and articles to poetry, memoir, photo essays, features, and interviews & oral histories. 

We are not interested in work that venerates an old (or new) white South, promotes a southern nation, or pines for the days of the Confederacy. 

The plural “cultures” in our name is intentional and is meant to recognize a region of many peoples, histories, memories, and interpretations.



Southern Cultures

General call

Guest edited by Shari Rabin (Oberlin College)
Although many see the South as a Protestant “Bible Belt,” it has always been home to a wide array of religions—what religious studies scholar Thomas Tweed defines as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.” Native American traditions, Africana religions, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Bahá’í, and new religious movements like Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Scientology, all have histories in the region, alongside many forms of Protestantism.
Practitioners of each of these traditions—and others—have brought to the South their own cosmologies, practices, rituals, objects, and self-conceptions, which influenced how practitioners engaged with and were received by those around them. They have operated within a complex field of power relations, in which racial and religious differences and hierarchies were intertwined.
We seek submissions that explore the South as home to multiple religious traditions, from before colonization to the present day, engaging historical, literary, documentary, ethnographic, and other methods. How have varied religious groups related to and shaped the region’s racial politics, its built and natural environment, its cultural expressions, and one another? How might a broader understanding of its multireligious history revise our understandings of the region? How do southern narratives contribute to current conversations in religious studies?
Submissions may explore any topic related to the theme, and we welcome investigations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir (first-person or collective), interviews, surveys, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. 
 Possible topics and questions to explore might include (but are not limited to):
·  Native American, Africana, and immigrant religiosities
·  New religious movements
·  Religions as vectors of global entanglement
·  Sacred spaces 
·  Cultural production
·  Interreligious encounters
·  Religious bigotries
·  Religio-racial identities in/of the South
·  Religion and politics, including on the Left
·  Religion and gender/sex 
As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here. We do not accept simultaneous submissions and ask that you do not submit your work elsewhere while it is under consideration at Southern Cultures.
In preparing your manuscript, please double space and use 12-point Times New Roman font and 1.25-inch margins (left/right). For questions of style, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and follow the CMoS Quick Guide for guidance on formatting endnotes. For spelling and hyphenation, please consult Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
All submissions are subject to review by the editors and by external referees and, if accepted, will be copyedited for style, clarity, and soundness of argument. This can take the form of light copyediting or more involved content and organizational editing. We see the copyediting process as dynamic and collaborative, and authors will have an opportunity to respond to the reviewers and to subsequent copyedits. Authors transfer copyright of accepted work to Southern Cultures, although we are pleased to grant authors permission to reprint their essays with acknowledgement upon request. We do our best to respond to submissions within 8 weeks.

Religion

Guest edited by Kami Fletcher (Goucher College)
Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Death & Grieving, to be published Winter 2026. We will accept submissions for this issue through March 2, 2026.
In the colonial and antebellum South, a racial system of hypodescent—the “one drop rule” that categorized someone as Black—followed a person to their grave. Marked by plantation slavery, racialized burial grounds reflected a social order in which people were categorized not only as Black or white but also as enslaved or free. These categories determined who would be remembered and who would be forgotten after death, divisions that became deeply imprinted on southern culture, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War. Through cemetery rituals, commemorations, and, eventually, the establishment of holidays such as Memorial Day, mourning became a public act that reinforced racial boundaries and competing historical narratives. 
This duality that came to normalize southern deathways lays bare the social constructions that shaped death and mourning. It also forces us to contend with our understandings of the living and their influence on death and to consider how racial hierarchies shaped ideas of memory and the afterlife. Although southern death culture has often been framed in dichotomous terms, this special edition encourages readers to move beyond such binaries and consider the heterogeneous nature of death in the South—one shaped by Indigenous nations, immigrant communities, and the southern border. Examining the racialized politics of mourning on the borderlands reveals how contemporary death care, death work, and burial practices are shaped by transnational movement of people, cultural hybridity, and the precarious realities of immigration.
Submissions may explore the role racial understandings play in both past and contemporary southern death practices. We seek submissions that interrogate the role of deathscapes in how we understand race, memory, and identity in southern culture, including the ways in which public acts reinforced racial boundaries and historical narratives. We encourage critical perspectives on how death care work, underscored by gender, race, and class, serve as catalysts for change. Submissions exploring the performance of death, loss, mourning, and commemoration are also welcomed.
Possible topics and questions to explore might include (but are not limited to):
· Racialized burial grounds and cemetery segregation in the pre-contact, colonial, antebellum, and post–Civil War South
· The legacy of plantation slavery in shaping southern deathscapes and memorial practices
·  Hypodescent, racial classification, and the politics of remembrance and forgetting
·  Gendered labor of mourning: women’s roles in death care, memorialization, and remembrance
·  The material culture and arts of deathways from grave sites to foodways, visual arts, and music
·  Death doulas and death doula-ing in the South
·  Southern funeral directors and the Civil Rights Movement
·  Jazz funerals and other celebratory commemorations of death and grieving
·  Memorial Day, public commemoration, and the racialization of national mourning
·  Death care work as a site of racial, class, and gender inequality and resistance
·  Indigenous deathways and burial practices in the South, past and present
·  Borderland culture and deathways along the US-Mexico border
·  The border as a symbolic and material site of death, mourning, and exclusion
·  How deathways reveal broader structures of power, belonging, and citizenship in the South
·  Resistance, remembrance, and alternative memorial practices that challenge racialized death regimes
As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here. We do not accept simultaneous submissions and ask that you do not submit your work elsewhere while it is under consideration at Southern Cultures.
In preparing your manuscript, please double space and use 12-point Times New Roman font and 1.25-inch margins (left/right). For questions of style, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and follow the CMoS Quick Guide for guidance on formatting endnotes. For spelling and hyphenation, please consult Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
All submissions are subject to review by the editors and by external referees and, if accepted, will be copyedited for style, clarity, and soundness of argument. This can take the form of light copyediting or more involved content and organizational editing. We see the copyediting process as dynamic and collaborative, and authors will have an opportunity to respond to the reviewers and to subsequent copyedits. Authors transfer copyright of accepted work to Southern Cultures, although we are pleased to grant authors permission to reprint their essays with acknowledgement upon request. We do our best to respond to submissions within 8 weeks.

Death & Grieving

Guest edited by Elizabeth M. Webb (artist and filmmaker; Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Ground, to be published Spring 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue through June 5, 2026, at https://southerncultures.submittable.com/Submit.
This special issue of Southern Cultures engages ground as method. We are seeking projects that think from and with ground (rather than “about” it), offering southern soils as generative ways of knowing.
Ground here is both literal and conceptual. The particular grounds of the South—from dark, fertile soil to delta silt deposited over centuries to sandy coastal plains to red clay that sticks to the soles (or souls)—hold memory, time, and possibility. Ground is always-already in relation: never separate from water, air, what grows, and what decays. Soil texture, described by varying proportions of clay, sand, and silt, is one expression of this interdependence. Clay retains water but drains slowly, sand allows flow but doesn’t cohere, and silt accumulates as evidence of what has moved through. We’re interested in these and other material qualities of ground as openings for thought, practice, rebellion, and form. Ground can be fertile or depleted, stable or shifting, witness or accomplice. We consider southern groundedness—what it is to be grounded in this place, literally and imaginatively—in our relationship to dirt, and welcome visual art, poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction that engage these tensions and possibilities.
This issue finds roots in Black geographies and Indigenous methodologies, thinking alongside Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Tiffany Lethabo King, Mishuana Goeman, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among many others. We are interested in work that contends with complex sedimentary histories of place, thinking South as both a specific location and a site of ongoing spatial struggle. Our understanding of “the South” is expansive, acknowledging the region’s entanglements in histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, plantation slavery, and empire that connect it to broader Global South geographies of extraction, displacement, and resistance.
Possible topics could include but are not limited to:
Soil/earth as archive: what ground holds, preserves, or refuses to release
Working materially: how ground’s physical properties guide making, thinking, and form
Southern dirt; how dirt marks, moves, and makes culture
Collaborative practices: art, agriculture, or inquiry that works with rather than extracts from ground
Land-based practices, including mounds and earthworks; contemporary Indigenous land stewardship
Renewal and repair: reclamation, regenerative agriculture, and rewilding
Contested ground: land as relation or commodity, Indigenous sovereignty, dispossession, extraction, plantation logics
Burial grounds and sacred sites: ground as keeper of memory
Erosion and accumulation: what wears away, what deposits, sedimentary layers of place
Contaminated ground: toxicity, environmental injustice, what pollutes and persists
Ground’s expansive relations: to water systems, foodways, climate, migration, labor, law, and other interconnected processes
As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submission guidelines, please click here.
In preparing your manuscript, please double space and use 12-point Times New Roman font and 1.25-inch margins (left/right). For questions of style, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and follow the CMoS Quick Guide for guidance on formatting endnotes. For spelling and hyphenation, please consult Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
All submissions are subject to review by the editors and by external referees and, if accepted, will be copyedited for style, clarity, and soundness of argument. This can take the form of light copyediting or more involved content and organizational editing. We see the copyediting process as dynamic and collaborative, and authors will have an opportunity to respond to the reviewers and to subsequent copyedits. Authors transfer copyright of accepted work to Southern Cultures, although we are pleased to grant authors permission to reprint their essays with acknowledgement upon request. We do our best to respond to submissions within 8 weeks.

Ground

Guest Editor: Melinda Wiggins (Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies)
Southern Cultures, the award-winning, peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Ground, to be published Spring 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue through August 31, 2026.
The US South has long depended on a working class rooted in a legacy of unpaid labor. Enslaved workers not only built the agricultural empire in the South but laid the groundwork for the relationships between farmworkers and farm owners/agricultural producers that persist today. The modern agricultural industry continues to follow the old rules that exemplify the truism that race and class are inextricably intertwined and continually reinforce each other. While the industry was founded on an enslaved Black workforce, the majority of agricultural workers in the United States today are from Mexico and are undocumented. These economic migrants have left their homes not out of choice but because of economic necessity. Consequently, they face dangerous conditions, often working under oppressive conditions and coercive employers.
The system of who holds and who lacks power was built during the nation’s founding and heavily influences current power relationships between workers and owners in virtually every industry and sector of the US South. Through this special issue, we will explore ways this history is playing out in the agricultural industry today and how agricultural workers are increasingly demonstrating agency and demanding that their full lives are recognized, documented, and valued.
Although we are living in a time with information at our fingertips, there is still a lack of awareness of agricultural workers’ daily lives, rituals, work, hardships, and rich cultural traditions. For this special issue, we call for submissions that reckon with and shed light on how misconceptions and inaccurate narratives of southern farming, such as the dominant myth of the white farmer, have been constructed in the public imagination around race, class, and labor. This issue centers on the voices of workers who are at the heart of corporate agricultural farms, including livestock operations, produce, and nurseries, as well as sustainable, small-scale farms and cooperatives.
We encourage critical perspectives on how workers seek change, including labor activism, civic education, community organizing, and worker-driven social responsibility models. We are particularly interested in how farm labor connects to other organizing efforts in the US South and beyond.
Submissions may explore any topic related to the theme, and we welcome investigations of the region in the forms Southern Cultures publishes: scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir (first-person or collective), interviews, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. We are particularly interested in short firsthand narratives from workers in their native languages (including, for example, Haitian Creole–speaking nursery workers in Florida, Spanish-speaking migrant workers in South Carolina, and Guatemalan poultry plant workers in North Carolina). These will be presented bilingually in the final publication. Submissions should use plain language that is accessible to and usable by workers, organizers, and advocates. We are also looking for submissions that tell hidden truths, challenge, and inspire.
Possible topics and questions to explore include but are not limited to:
As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submission guidelines, please click here.
In preparing your manuscript, please double space and use 12-point Times New Roman font and 1.25-inch margins (left/right). For questions of style, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and follow the CMoS Quick Guide for guidance on formatting endnotes. For spelling and hyphenation, please consult Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.
All submissions are subject to review by the editors and by external referees and, if accepted, will be copyedited for style, clarity, and soundness of argument. This can take the form of light copyediting or more involved content and organizational editing. We see the copyediting process as dynamic and collaborative, and authors will have an opportunity to respond to the reviewers and to subsequent copyedits. Authors transfer copyright of accepted work to Southern Cultures, although we are pleased to grant authors permission to reprint their essays with acknowledgement upon request. We do our best to respond to submissions within 8 weeks.

Farm Labor — Fiction

Farm Labor — Nonfiction

Farm Labor — Multimedia

Guest Editors: Sarah Besky (Cornell University, sb2626@cornell.edu), Kasia Paprocki (London School of Economics, K.Paprocki@lse.ac.uk), Austin Zeiderman (London School of Economics, A.Zeiderman@lse.ac.uk)
Southern Cultures, the award-winning peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, The Garden, to be published Fall 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue through November 1, 2026.
This special issue explores the southern garden magazine as a lens through which to consider the region’s entanglements in broader histories and geographies of colonization with and through plants. Imperial connections link the South to people, places, and plants far beyond it, and we welcome submissions with an expansive view of the region.
We invite authors to address how extraction, dispossession, theft, and violence undergird the aestheticized spaces celebrated in garden magazines. Such publications organize ideas about nature, domesticity, aesthetics, identity, and order, combining up-close images of ornamental beauty with news and features from curated private and public gardens, opulent country homes, and coastal estates. Interspersed throughout are lifestyle articles, food and drink stories, destination pieces, celebrity profiles, fashion and interior design sections, and images of hunting, fishing, and shooting. The garden magazine renders the imperial connections that brought the garden into being palatable and pleasing.
In this special issue, we’ll look beyond the gloss to examine how garden landscapes (and plant life) are inescapably imperial—the plants featured were wrested from Indigenous communities, the stately homes once housed former slave owners and traders, and the regional recipes call for ingredients made accessible through colonial occupation and plantation production, migration, and global exchange. Because garden magazines assume a racialized, classed, and gendered readership, contributions should engage with the naturalization of difference.
This is a creative experiment in which form matters. We welcome submissions that riff on magazine features, as well as scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir, interviews, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. Topics can include but are not limited to:
·  Tourism and travel destinations, such as plantations, country houses, or gardens
·  The art of plants and empire in the South
·  Interior/garden design or “lifestyle” pieces
·  Alternative atlases and/or mapping of southern plants and empire
·  Fashion/style/clothing
·  Food and drink
·  Expert interviews/biographies (e.g., southern gardeners or landscapers)
·  “Invasive” plant species
·  Public and private gardens and memory
·  Landscaping (labor and practice) and class in the South
·  Radical gardening (e.g., guerrilla gardening, antihunger gardens, Black-owned gardens, garden commons, and differently-abled garden spaces)
·  Feminist approaches to and/or queering the southern garden and plants
·  “Green space” and city design
·  Seed collection/preservation
·  Plants as markers of regionalism (e.g., coastal plants, inland plants, Appalachian plants)
·  Public history/historic sites, gardens, museums
As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here.

Southern Cultures

Highlights

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Featured Call

The Garden — Nonfiction