Tim Williams

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

Major Field: US History

Other Fields: Southern Intellectual and Cultural History; Nineteenth Century Southern History; History of Gender and Sexuality.

Advisor: Harry L. Watson

Research Interests:  My dissertation examines the paradoxical embrace of nineteenth-century individualism by a hierarchical, slave-based world.  I explore the intellectual labors of students who attended the University of North Carolina between 1795 and 1861 in order to show that bourgeois individualism made significant inroads into southern society through higher education.  Student compositions, orations, letters, diaries, and library records reveal that higher education provided young men with more than training for leadership; college offered to students opportunities to explore what kinds of men they wanted to become through reading, writing, and speaking.  In the process, they arrived at conceptions of selfhood and personality that were changeable, adaptive, and more self-made than they were grounded in fixed family and community hierarchies.  Students' private reading and writing exercises were important mechanisms in their intellectual formation and proxy forms of new relations between private experience and identity formation, which occurred throughout the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century through the spread of evangelical Christianity and mass-marketed books.  This dissertation challenges long-held notions that everyday life in the region was intellectually void, and it complicates honor-based characterizations of southern manhood by interpreting higher education as a crucible for the development of modernity in the Old South.