JohnReed

John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science for twelve years and helped to found the university's Center for the Study of the American South.

He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, did his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University before going to Chapel Hill in 1969. He has written or edited over a dozen books, including 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. His articles have appeared in professional and popular periodicals ranging from Science to Southern Living, and he was founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has lectured at over 300 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including a number of universities in India as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, and he has held visiting positions at many institutions, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London, and St. Antony's College, Oxford University. He spent 1996-97 at Cambridge University as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and Fellow of St Catharine's College.

He has been president of the Southern Sociological Society and the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research, and was appointed by President Reagan to the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including election to the Fellowship of Southern Writers and honorary degrees from the University of the South and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

He has served as a consultant to Southern Living, Quaker Grits, the Turner South cable network, AnythingSouthern.com, and the musical comedy Kudzu. He has been a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and his country song "My Tears Spoiled My Aim" was recently recorded by Tommy Edwards. He is the only sociologist to be included in Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor.

In 2004 he was Humana Visiting Professor at Centre College, visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, and visiting professor at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. In the fall semester of 2005 he was Watson-Brown Visiting Professor at the University of South Carolina's Institute for Southern Studies, he will spend the fall semester of 2006 at Louisiana State University, and in the fall of 2007 he will be the Mark Clark Visiting Professor at the Citadel.