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

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

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 Abadie’s founding stamp, among them the foodways alliance, which 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, Mississippi”; the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference; and Living Blues magazine.

Abadie’s ecumenical Southern outlook was evident in perhaps the most famous of the center’s publications, the landmark Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), an exuberant, semi-irreverent but serious attempt to define the essence of Southern-ness across racial, ethnic and disciplinary lines. Abadie was the associate editor of both the original one-volume edition and its 24-volume remake, published between 2006 and 2013. In the original, there were entries on air-conditioning, gumbo, the boll weevil, opossums, fried chicken and dirt-eating, as well as page after page infused with the South’s dark overlay of slavery and racial oppression.

The encyclopedia marked a new Southern self-consciousness, celebratory but reflective. It did not try to hide the ugliness of the South’s history, and it was not ashamed of its culture’s homelier aspects. The book’s publication coincided with a moment in the troubled history of Abadie’s adopted state, Mississippi, when its racist past was being forcefully rejected by some of the state’s leaders.

William Faulkner was Abadie’s own gateway into this new way of thinking about the South. She came to the University of Mississippi in 1960 from her native South Carolina to pursue a doctorate on him, and was “thrilled a few days after arrival in Oxford to see the author sitting on his mother’s front porch, talking with her,” she wrote in an undated reminiscence.

It was natural for Abadie to be drawn to Faulkner, said William Ferris, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whom Abadie recruited to be the first director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 1978. Faulkner was, he said, “trying to break out of the constraints of race, class and gender in his own way, and early on she felt that personally.”

Abadie “saw a window of opportunity through this writer, to explore, and express, a better future for the South,” Ferris said in an interview. At the center, he added, “we opened the windows and doors to everything related to race.”

The institution took off, granting America’s first degrees in Southern studies. “The key to it was Ann Abadie,” he said.

Elizabeth Ann Julian was born Aug. 15, 1939, in Greenville, South Carolina, to Frank Jefferson Julian, a textile mill worker, and Pansy Luna (Falls) Julian. She graduated from high school in Taylorsville, North Carolina, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Wake Forest University in 1960 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Mississippi in 1963.

She was at the university, popularly known as “Ole Miss,” in the fall of 1962 when thousands of students and others rioted over the admission of a Black student, James Meredith, and President John F. Kennedy was forced to send in hundreds of federal agents. “Several of us were interested in the injustice of the system,” Abadie commented, with typical understatement, about the episode in “Ann Abadie: In the Spotlight,” a 2019 film about her.

She stayed on at Ole Miss, helping organize the first Faulkner conference and recruiting scholars and critics like Joseph Blotner and Malcolm Cowley. The event was a success from its inception. When the organizers placed a small ad for the conference in The New York Times Book Review, “the phone started ringing off the hook,” Abadie recalled.

Over the years, she edited many of the conference proceedings, including “Faulkner’s Geographies” (2015), “Fifty Years after Faulkner” (2016), “Faulkner’s Inheritance” (2007) and “Faulkner and Film” (2014), as well as books such as The Mississippi Encyclopedia (2017).

In addition to her daughter, Leslie, Abadie is survived by her husband of 60 years, H. Dale Abadie, a retired history professor at Ole Miss; another daughter, Elaine Abadie; a son, John; five grandchildren; and two sisters, Carolyn Cooper and Lou Anderson.

“Her genius was putting people together and getting them to collaborate, and getting them to shine,” Leslie Abadie said of her mother. “She created the environment so these pieces could fall into place.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.