Dr. Laura Franey, Assistant Professor of English, is a Southern California native with a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. While at Millsaps, 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 was published in fall 2003 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently working on a book-length project that explores ethnic performance and gendered boundary-crossing in literature by Japanese immigrants and about Japan from the late nineteenth-century through the late twentieth century.

Dr. Eric Griffin, Associate Professor of English, hails from California's San Joaquin Valley. He received 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 primary teaching and research interests include Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama; The Romance; the literatures of early modern nationalism, colonialism, and discovery; and Protestant anti-Catholic polemic. His essays have been published in Representations, English Literary Renaissance, CR: The New Centennial Review, and the Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen edited anthology, Shakespeare and History (1999). New work will appear in the forthcoming Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Invention of the North Atlantic World (Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet eds., U of Pennsylvania P, 2004), and Griffin is currently completing a manuscript entitled Ethno-poetics and Empire: English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain.

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, who holds the Eudora Welty Chair for the 2003-2004 term, is a graduate of the University of Texas. General editor of the eighty-plus 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.

Aleda Shirley, the visiting Straddlefork lecturer in creative writing, is the author of Long Distance (Miami University Press, 1996) and Chinese Architecture (University of Georgia Press, 1986), which won the Poetry Society of America's First Book Award. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. In 1999 she edited The Beach Book: A Literary Companion (Saradande Books). "The Interior West," a short story, recently appeared in The Oxford American (April 2001).

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.