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English > Faculty

Faculty

Department of English

Dr. Curtis Coats joined the English faculty at Millsaps College in 2009 to help launch the new communications major. He earned his doctorate in Communications from the University of Colorado in 2007. In 2008, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at University of Colorado. His research explores media and religion in everyday life, with particular emphases on religious/spiritual tourism and the role of media and religion on gender identity. He is at work on a manuscript with co-author Stewart M. Hoover that explores the relationships among media, religion and masculinity, and he recently finished a chapter on New Age tourism in Sedona, Arizona, for the forthcoming edited volume, Media, Spiritualities and Social Change.

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, 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. His recent 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 work on England and Spain has appeared in such journals as Representations, English Literary Renaissance, CR: The New Centennial Review, and The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies. 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. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Professor Griffin teaches regularly in the Living in Yucatan Program and directs the Millsaps College Program in Latin American Studies.

Dr. Steve Kistulentz joined the Millsaps faculty in 2009 as an assistant professor of English. An award-winning poet and fiction writer, he is the author of the forthcoming book of poems, The Luckless Age, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award, which will be published by Red Hen Press in early 2011. He holds a doctorate from the Florida State University, where he was the Edward C. and Marie Kingsbury Fellow for Excellence in Thought, and a M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work appears regularly in literary magazines, and he is a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets John Mackay Shaw Prize. His research and teaching interests include film and television studies, contemporary poetry and fiction, and cultural criticism. He is at work on a book-length narrative nonfiction project called The Half-Hours: Fathers, Sons and Television.

Dr. Anne C. MacMaster, Chair of the Department, 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, The Long Journey: Sudanese Refugees in Mississippi Tell Their Stories (PDF)

Dr. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Millsaps College Humanities 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, Professor Emeritus, 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.