Robert Ferguson

Robert Ferguson

Ph.D. Student
rhfergus@email.unc.edu

Major Field: US History

Other Fields: African American History, American South, Labor, Music, Folklore

Advisor: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Research Interests: My dissertation focuses on the issues of race and labor in the rural American South during Jim Crow.  In particular, my research delves into two agricultural cooperatives in Mississippi organized by socialists, Christian missionaries, and labor activists to give displaced tenant farmers a cooperative, communitarian alternative to plantation agriculture.  The cooperatives operated on an interracial basis, posing a challenge to the South’s twin dilemmas: race and poverty.