Dr. Anita DeRouen, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing & Teaching, is a native of south Louisiana. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Georgia in 2007 and joined the Millsaps faculty in 2008. Dr. DeRouen’s main foci are composition and rhetoric, particularly issues related to the acquisition, practice, and retention of digital literacy skills, but her scholarly and teaching pursuits also include study of the British Romantic and Modern periods (particularly the work of William Blake and W. B. Yeats) and various topics related to writing and digital culture. She is currently working on studies of the literacy and communicative challenges of online reading and the application of markup language to disciplinary reading tasks.
Dr. Laura Franey,
Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department, is a Southern California native with a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. A professor at Millsaps since 1999, she has taught a range of courses that radiate out from her primary research and teaching interests: Victorian literature, post-colonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and the novel. Her book entitled Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855-1902 came out in 2003 (Palgrave Macmillan Press). In 2007, she published a new edition of the first novel published in the United States by a person of Japanese descent -- The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, by Yone Noguchi. (For this new edition, she shared editing duties with Edward Marx of Ehime University in Japan and provided a new Introduction.) Dr. Franey is presently working on a book-length study of women's modes of transportation as portrayed in Victorian prose fiction and art.
Dr. Eric Griffin, Associate Professor of English, hails from California's San Joaquin Valley. He joined the Millsaps faculty in 1998 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where he was awarded the D.C. Spiestersbach Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Research in the Humanities and Fine Arts. Dr. Griffin’s book, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), explores Anglo-Hispanic literary and cultural relations from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. His essays and reviews have been published in Representations, English Literary Renaissance, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Early Theatre and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. His most well known essay, “Un-sainting James: Othello and the Spanish Spirits of Shakespeare’s Globe,” was anthologized by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen in Shakespeare and History (1999). An essay on the colonial writing of Captain John Smith, which compares English and Spanish colonial efforts in North America, appeared in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Invention of the North Atlantic World, Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet eds. (2005). Dr. Griffin also directs the Millsaps Program in Latin American Studies.
Dr. Anne C. MacMaster, whose University of Virginia dissertation examines Edith Wharton's feminist revisions of the tradition of Hawthorne and James, teaches a variety of courses in American literature--American renaissance, realism and naturalism, American women writers, women and men in America, and African American literature--as well as courses in English literature: England in the nineteenth century and history of English literature II. Dr. MacMaster has recently published articles on the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and she is now at work on two projects, one examining the paired heroines of Harlem Renaissance novelists Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, and the other examining the function of characters of color--what Toni Morrison calls "the Africanist Presence"--in the novels of Edith Wharton.
Dr. Suzanne Marrs took her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Marrs teaches courses in composition, nineteen and twentieth-century American literature, and twentieth-century southern literature. Her research interests center on the American South and especially upon Eudora Welty. She has lectured on Welty's fiction in this country, in Russia, and in France, and was a consultant for the 1987 BBC documentary on Eudora Welty. In addition to numerous articles, she has published three books: The Welty Collection, Welty and Politics: "Did the Writer Crusade?" (co-edited with Harriel Pollack), and One Writer's Imagination: the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Dr. Marrs received the Phoenix Award for Outstanding Achievement in Eudora Welty Scholarship in 1998 and currently is Welty Foundation Scholar in Residence.
Dr. Greg Miller. Greg Miller’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review, Open City, Tikkun, and other journals. Rib Cage (2001) and Iron Wheel (1998) were published by the University of Chicago Press, and Mississippi Sudan (2006) by Mercy Seat Press in late 2006. George Herbert’s ‘Holy Patterns’: Reforming Individuals in Community, a scholarly study of the seventeenth-century Anglican priest and poet, was published by Continuum Publishing in June of 2007. Miller has been a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Yaddo and MacDowell Colonies in the United States, and at the Camargo Foundation and the CAMAC Centre d’Art in France. Miller was named Mississippi Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Having served as chair of the English Department and President of the Faculty Council, Miller is a professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi; he received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, his M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University and his B.A. in French Literature and Political Science from Vanderbilt University. Miller currently serves as chair of the Sudanese Ministry Committee of the Episcopal Church, Diocese of Mississippi, and he has edited and published, with the help of his students, a pamphlet of personal stories by Sudanese refugees entitled The Long Journey: Sudanese Refugees in Mississippi Tell Their Stories, copies of which may be downloaded free on-line at the following web address:
http://www.millsaps.edu/news_events/releases/february/sudaneserefugee.shtml
Dr. Peggy Whitman
Prenshaw, Millsaps College Humanties Scholar in Residence, is a graduate of the University of Texas. General editor of the one hundred volume Literary Conversations series published by the University Press of Mississippi, she also edited the Welty and Elizabeth Spencer volumes. She has published widely on southern women writers, including Elizabeth Spencer and, among a number of edited books, such titles as Order and Image in the American Small Town, Women Writers of the Contemporary South, and Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. She is currently completing a book on southern women's autobiographies. Recently retired from the Fred C. Frey Chair in Southern Studies at Louisiana State University, Prenshaw has served as president of SCMLA, the Eudora Welty Society, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and in 1994 she received the NEH Frankel Prize, awarded in White House ceremonies, for her outstanding contribution to the humanities. From 1999 to 2003 she served on the National Council on the Humanities.
Dr. Austin Wilson is originally from Waycross in southeast Georgia (Okefenokee Swamp and
the Georgia coast were his old stomping grounds). He studied under James
Dickey and George Garrett at the University of South Carolina, where he
received his Ph.D. His work at South Carolina was in American literature
and creative writing. Dr. Wilson has published both poetry and fiction
in a number of magazines and anthologies, including a story and a group
of poems in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, volumes
one and two. He is still at work on a novel-"Looking through Water"
is its current title-that one day, he hopes, will surface. Dr. Wilson's
teaching interests include James Joyce, William Faulkner, the Irish Literary
Renaissance, Southern Fiction, film studies, and creative writing. Dr.
Wilson currently serves as chair of the English department.
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