Doing Southern Studies Today

Friday, January 15

 

11.00 a.m.-12.15 p.m.: Keynote Lecture

 

Martyn Bone is associate professor of American Literature at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (U of Georgia P, 2018; runner-up for the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature) and The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State UP, 2005). He is also the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (UP of Mississippi, 2006) and the coeditor of the “Understanding the South” mini-series (all UP of Florida): Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (2013); The American South in the Atlantic World (2013); and Creating and Consuming the American South (2015). His articles have appeared in American LiteratureAfrican American Review, Journal of American StudiesCR: New Centennial Review, and other journals.

 

1.30-3.00 p.m.: Transnational Trajectories

 

Hilary Meuter is a PhD student in the department of American Studies at TU Dortmund. The working title for her dissertation is "Mapping the Change in the Discourse of Memory: An Analysis of the Expression of Collective Memory.” Research interests include public history, the American Civil War and collective memory. She teaches in the American Studies department and is an instructor of English and academic writing at TU Dortmund’s Zentrum für Hochschulbildung.

 

Amy Doherty Mohr currently teaches Southern literature and Harlem Renaissance literature in the Department of English and American Studies, LMU Munich. Her publications include studies of New Orleans literature, the recovered fiction of María Cristina Mena, as well as the novels of Harper Lee and Willa Cather. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Tufts University and was previously a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

Annika Schadewaldt studied American and cultural studies at Leipzig University and Mount Holyoke College. Currently, she is working as a junior assistant professor (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) of American literature at American Studies Leipzig, where she is also pursuing a PhD. Her PhD project focuses on questions of style in US American novels of the first two decades after WWII. Next to her PhD research, she is interested in issues of theory and methodology in literary studies and has done some work on Modernism as well as contemporary pop culture.

 

3.30-5.00 p.m.: Practices in Southern Studies

 

Michael P. Bibler is Robert Penn Warren Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968 and is currently finishing a book manuscript about queer literature, music, film, performance, and art from the 1980s to the present, entitled Literally, Queerly: The Silly Pleasures of Silly Pleasures. Under the penname Paul Pycraft, he is also author of the children's book, The Octopus's Holiday: A Different Kind of Christmas Story.

 

Gina Caison (TBA)

 

Laura Wilson is a Council on Library Information and Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in African American Studies at Fisk University. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Mississippi in May 2020, with a dissertation entitled “On Southern Soil: The Art and Ecology of Racial Uplift, 1895-1950.” Laura’s article “‘Giving voice to the tireless relish of life’: Listening for the Plantation in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” was published in Mississippi Quarterly Vol. 70/71, No.1. She has presented at multiple conferences including the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.