John Shelton Reed


John Shelton Reed is an American sociologist and essayist, author or editor of 22 books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement, in 2000, as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He helped to found the Center for the Study of the American South and was a founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures.
Reed served as president of the Southern Sociological Society in 1988 to 1989 and the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research in 1999 to 2000. He was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2000, and was chancellor of that organization from 2009 to 2011. He has lectured at over 300 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad and held visiting positions at over a dozen, including Fulbright lectureships in Israel and India, and the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University.
After his retirement from the University of North Carolina, he held visiting positions at a number of institutions; among other things, he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University and a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina Unorganized Militia while he was teaching at The Citadel, in Charleston.
Reed has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

Selected works