But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

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. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement in 2000 as William Rand Kenan Jr. from Columbia University in 1971.