October 1, Exhibit Opening: 5:30–7:00 PM
6:00 PM: Conversation with Emily Rena Williams, Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris (Center director), and Dr. Shari Rabin (SC guest editor)

Center for the Study of the American South
410 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill
Free & open to the public

Celebrating Southern Cultures’s Religion issue with featured photographer and UNC doctoral student Emily Rena Williams. Her series “Infinite Poem” explores identity and place in small Jewish communities in the Deep South. Refreshments provided. CLE credit for students.

Cosponsored by the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies

Emily Rena Williams is an artist and educator interested in investigating communal and individual memory, identity, and placemaking through photography, writing, and audio. She holds a BA in fine arts and history from Haverford College and an MFA in photography from Louisiana State University. After earning her MFA, she served as a curatorial fellow at The Do Good Fund in Columbus, Georgia. Emily is currently a second year in the American Studies PhD program at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she is a Tau Epsilon Phi Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. Her work, We had to know who we were; We had to know who we weren’t, documents Jewish communities past and present in the rural and small-town Deep South through photography and oral history interviews.

Shari Rabin teaches in Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2017) and The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press,2025). She is currently vice president of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.