ROLLA, Mo. – Will white southerners once again rally around the confederate flag as a symbol of unified identity? Dr. Trent Brown, an expert on white identity and white masculinity in the modern South, is available to talk to media about white identity in the South and the confederate flag’s meaning.

Brown, an associate professor of American studies at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), is the author of two books on southern identity: White Masculinity in the Recent South (2008) and One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890-1920 (2010). Both books were written under Brown’s former name, Trent Watts. In the latter book, Brown describes how “the perceived threat of black aspirations to civil rights resulted in the creation and widespread acceptance of the ideal I call ‘pan-whiteness,’ that all white southerners are one community, a notion that proved persuasive and tenacious for generations.”

The confederate flag has been a source of controversy and divisiveness in the South for decades, Brown says. Events following the recent shooting deaths of nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, have made the flag a topic of discussion and debate once again.

The reactions to the controversial flag indicate how strong and divisive a symbol it has become, says Brown, who holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.

“I grew up in Mississippi and have always been fascinated with the long shadow that the post-Reconstruction years cast on the South,” says Brown. His research focuses on the cultural history of the 20th-century American South.

Brown’s most recent book is Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer (2014), which was co-authored with civil rights activist Rev. Ed King and written under Brown’s former name, Trent Watts. Brown is also the editor of Civil Rights in Mississippi, a series forthcoming in 2016 from the University Press of Mississippi.

To arrange an interview with Brown, contact Missouri S&T marketing and communications at 573-341-4328 or [email protected].