A minor in southern studies will immerse Coastal Carolina students in diverse perspectives on the American South, a key subject of interest on account of CCU’s location and resources. The minor will incorporate a range of disciplines and courses that respond to the region’s notably complex history: native settlements and European “discovery”/colonization, a plantation economy supported by chattel slavery, the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the racial tensions of “Jim Crow” and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, urban-industrial development and suburbanization, global capital and digital media. Through a spectrum of texts and media—e.g., literary, cinematic, historical, political, religious, anthropological, sociological—produced in and/or about the region, students who minor in southern studies will explore the region’s literary, historical, political, economic, and ethnic subcultures and the South’s continuing centrality to understandings of “Americanness” in an increasingly fluid, transnational world.
The southern studies minor will be interdisciplinary in scope and will draw mainly from faculty, courses, centers, and resources already in place at Coastal. The minor requires students to complete 18 credit hours of coursework drawn from three areas, choosing at least one course from each of the areas. The remaining nine credit hours would be electives, additional courses drawn from any one or more of the three areas. Special topics courses deemed appropriate by the minor adviser can also satisfy minor requirements.
