Adam Gussow, professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, is retiring in May after 24 years of guiding students through examinations of Southern culture and history and the blues. Gussow will deliver this year's Last Lecture at 4 p.m. May 1 in Overby Center Auditorium. Photo by Olivia Whittington
Adam Gussow prepares to retire after 24 years in Southern studies
by Rebecca Lauck Cleary
On his first day of teaching at the University of Mississippi in 2002, Adam Gussow showed up in Barnard Observatory right at the start of class time, sweating profusely in the August heat. His left arm was in a cast from a recent bicycle accident on Pea Ridge Road, and he was flustered and in pain.
The native New Yorker was a little uncertain about his new place on the map, but he made it through his first day, and subsequent ones over the next 24 years. He is preparing to take his final trek through the building before retiring in May.
“Leaving Manhattan for Oxford, Mississippi, to begin a new life as an assistant professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi was the best move I’ve ever made, apart from asking my wife to marry me,” Gussow said. “It was a dream job in an amazingly convivial town, and—clichéd as it sounds—it gave me a chance to live my best life.”
Gussow will deliver this year’s Last Lecture at 4 p.m. May 1 in Overby Center Auditorium. The Tassels Chapter of Mortar Board asks one Ole Miss professor to “deliver a lecture to end the academic year as if it were the last lecture of their career.”
The Last Lecture series began at UM in 2013, inspired by the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.
“I’ve already sketched out a presentation and I plan to surprise people,” Gussow said. “That’s all I’ll say for now.”
Gussow, who earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton University and a master’s from Columbia University, wrote his dissertation on Southern violence and the blues tradition. He was looking for a tenure-track job in African American literature when he saw a listing for a position at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
“I knew about the center—I’d stopped by to visit Bill Ferris back in 1997 after my Satan & Adam duo had made the cover of Living Blues—but I hadn’t thought about Southern studies as a field,” Gussow said. “When I saw the job listing, though, I said, ‘Whoa! That’s perfect.'”
Somehow, he had gotten on the mailing list for the Southern Register, so he recalls reading about life at the center for many years before he actually arrived as a new hire.
“But like most of our faculty, I didn’t really know what Southern studies was until I arrived and found myself in a classroom teaching it in the company of other faculty who had been doing it, in my case, SST 101 with Robbie Etheridge and David Wharton in the fall of 2002,” Gussow said.
He team-taught SST 101 many times with five different people, but his relationship with Wharton, who died in 2022, was a real partnership.
“He saw me as the kid, early on—although I was in my mid-40s—and he thought that I overwrote,” Gussow said. “He taught me to pare down my sentences, especially quiz and essay questions. We drafted exams together, each looking over the other’s shoulder.”
Gussow recalls one of his favorite moments in the classroom from spring 2014, in an honors section of SST 102: Freedom Summer 1964: Mississippi’s Civil Rights Watershed. Bob Zellner, civil rights legend and original member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, visited campus and dropped by Gussow’s classroom.
“We’d been reading about him in several of the books I’d assigned,” Gussow said “Suddenly here he was, at the head of the conference room table, telling us a story about the day he and his fellow SNCC members had marched on city hall in McComb, Mississippi, and he, the lone white student, had been singled out by the mob—beaten with chains, bricks, lead pipes, and baseball bats—for daring to cross the color line.
“His voice caught; his eyes teared up. History was there, in the classroom, present and alive. The students were transfixed.”
On the administration side, Gussow has worked with three different center directors, and he sees the commonalities among Katie McKee, Ted Ownby, and Charles Reagan Wilson.
“Adventurous, wide-ranging, sharp-eyed scholars, each of them managed to be an active steward of the thing called Southern studies and a three-dimensional—indisputably human—figurehead for the center,” he said.
McKee said it has been a great privilege to work with Gussow during many years.
“He has never lost the energy and enthusiasm he brought with him to his first day on campus, and I am sure that will be evident in his Last Lecture,” McKee said.
Gussow said he is delighted at the honor.
“Although my books have won awards of various sorts over the years, this is, I believe, the first campuswide honor I’ve been lucky enough to snag,” he said.
When he is not inside in the air conditioning, Gussow is outside running.
“Running is my true passion, the thing that keeps me grounded,” he said. “But I also love to cook. This started when I was a child and my mother, a nutrition educator, told me I could have desserts only if I cooked them myself.”
He is also a blues harmonica player, as seen in the Netflix documentary Satan and Adam, and has published a number of books on the blues.
For the past several years, Gussow has also been researching a book about the worst school bus-train collision in New York state history, which took place one mile from his boyhood home in Congers.
“Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County; my little postage-stamp of native soil, Rockland County, was irreparably wounded by this disaster, and I’m determined to tell the story—a community’s story—in a way that moves and enlightens those of us who have lived with it all these years, and those who know nothing about it,” he said.
When he’s not working on the book, he will be running, traveling with his wife, Sherrie, and helping their son, Shaun, a music performance major at Ole Miss, make it through to graduation. Last year, Gussow wrote a book about his family, showing an intimate portrait of love, family, music and hope amid a backdrop of persistent racial challenges.
In the end, Gussow leaves with no regrets.
“I’ve written the books I hoped to write, learned so much from my students and colleagues, made more and better music than I expected to, fallen in love with the landscape, and enjoyed a wonderfully full family life with Sherrie and Shaun,” he said. “I’m filled with gratitude.”
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