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Rachel Reynolds Luster, a graduate assistant in Arkansas State University’s Heritage Studies PhD program, has been awarded two grants to fund her research of Arkansas’s music and food traditions. Luster was awarded a guided internship from the SouthernFoodways Alliance (SFA) at the University of Mississippi to document Arkansas barbecue for the organization’s Southern Barbecue Trail oral history project.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South through symposia, documentary films, published compendiums of great writing, and perhaps most importantly through its efforts to preserve, promote, and chronicle the South’s culinary standard bearers, according to its website. Luster will spend the year traveling the state photographing and conducting oral history interviews with the standard bearers of Arkansas’s barbecue traditions. She is the sole recipient of this award from SFA for 2010.

Luster also received a research grant from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) grants committee at the Yale University Library. Founded in 1966, the ARSC is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings—in all genres of music and speech, in all formats, and from all periods. She will create a discography of Arkansas fiddle music ranging from the 1920s through today for the project. This work is part of Luster’s study of Arkansas culture and heritage as she pursues her doctoral degree. She will discuss her work and other aspects of cultural sustainability at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Nashville, Tenn., in October.