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Education

• PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980

Areas of Specialization

• Modern Southern literature and culture
• American Regionalism
• Western literature

Recently Taught Courses

ENGL 285	Themes in American Writing: Literature of the West and the Western Hero
SOST 405/ENGL 429	Southern Writers and the West

Professional Accolades

• 2010 PROSE Award, given by the Association of American Publishers, for the best book published in literature, language, and linguistics in 2009 (for The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950).
• 2008 Warren-Brooks Award for Academic Excellence (for The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950).
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2003-2004.
• Lamar Lecture Series Speaker, Mercer University, October 1998.
• Bicentennial Chair in American Studies, Senior Fulbright Appointment, University of Helsinki, 1994-1995.

Current Research Projects

I am working on several essays, which are in various stages of development. I am finishing up an essay on the Civil War in contemporary Southern literature, a version of which I presented at a conference on Lincoln and the Civil War in American culture. This paper will be published in a collection of the conference proceedings. I am also making final revisions on an essay on Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, which will be published in a collection of essays on recent Southern fiction. I am in the midst of researching two other essays. One is a paper on V. S. Naipaul's travel literature, with a particular focus on his reportage of his trip through the South, A Turn in the South. This paper will be presented at an international conference on travel writing in Vienna in the fall of 2009, and will be subsequently published in a collection of the conference's proceedings. I am also beginning work on an essay on the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, looking at the importance of handicraft and work. This essay will draw from ideas developed by Elaine Scarry and Richard Sennett.

Selected Publications

Books

The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.

Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Delivered as the 42nd Annual Lamar Lectures at Mercer University (October 1998). Paperback edition, with new preface, published in November 2007.

Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

The Art and Vision of Flannery O=Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

Recent Presentations

• "A Geography of Hope, A Geography of Acceptance: Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe Trilogy." Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 9-12 October 2008.
• "Teaching Southern Studies in the Twenty-First Century." Conference Celebrating the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi, November 2007.
• Keynote Address at the Mark Twain and William Faulkner Symposium, University of Southeast Missouri, September 2006.

Other Information

• Editorial Board, The Flannery O'Connor Review.
• Editorial Board, The Mississippi Quarterly.
• Editorial Board, "New Directions in Southern Studies" book series, University of North Carolina Press.