Ann Abadie, Champion of Southern Studies, Is Dead at 84

Ann Abadie, a scholar of the South who helped found one of the country’s leading Southern studies institutes, died on July 30 in Tupelo, Miss. She was 84.

Her daughter Leslie Abadie said she died in a hospice after having a stroke.

Ms. Abadie spent her entire half-century career at the University of Mississippi, a place both embedded in Southern history and one of its key observatories. She played a major role in creating that latter-day role, writing successful proposals in 1976 to the National Endowment for the Humanities for grants that helped establish the university’s multidisciplinary, degree-granting Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

She served as the associate director of that institution until her retirement in 2011; along the way, she edited more than 50 books about the South.

Modest and self-effacing, she stayed in the background. But she is credited by associates as a linchpin, through her work at the center, in transforming the university from a global anti-civil-rights symbol into a modern multiracial campus.

The center was her brainchild, along with that of a few other faculty members. It was a project aimed at “breaking down the barriers of communication between different people and particularly between different races and ethnic groups,” as she put it in a 2005 interview with the Southern Foodways Alliance, part of the center. It now grants degrees in Southern studies across disciplines like history, literature, sociology, food history and anthropology.

Affiliated ventures also bear Ms. Abadie’s founding stamp, among them the foodways alliance, which the New York Times food correspondent Kim Severson called a “powerful stage for cooks, writers and academics who gather each fall for its symposium in Oxford, Miss.”; the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference; and Living Blues magazine.