Background

Charles  received a B.A. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and an M.A. from the College of William & Mary.  He is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program.  His research interests include Anthropology of Religion and History, Scots-Irish Folk Music, and the History of the American South. His M.A. thesis, "Sarah's Song: How Folk Music Shattered Slaveholding Ideology in Antebellum Alabama," presents methodology for harnessing the motion behind written symbols as a way of answering historical problems, and gives a case study—an examination of the slaveholding ideology of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, an antebellum Alabama mistress—as a glimpse of the methodology’s application.  In it, he argues that African American rhythms are hidden behind lyrics Sarah penned to describe her hatred for slaves, and that this rhythmic presence reveals the limits of literary analysis: the motional context of words transforms their meaning.  Sarah penned the lyrics to Scots-Irish music; reconstructing the music and marrying it to her lyrics betrays her use of off-beat phrasing, an African-American improvisational device known to have been harnessed by slaves in the vicinity.  When resurrected, Sarah's song ultimately reveals how the dehumanizing ideology of chattel slavery destabilized the aural universe she inhabited: one in which mistress and slave sounds were equally human.

 He is currently conducting research for my dissertation, which examines the (dis)connections/interplay between racism and religion in the South across the early republic and antebellum eras.  The driving question: was racism a spiritual practice, and, if so, what does this tell us about the phenomenological world those who practiced it inhabited?