Millsaps College to Establish Welty Scholar-in-Residence Program

Dr. Suzanne Marrs, professor of English at Millsaps College, has been named the first Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence. In addition to teaching and other professional duties at the college, Marrs will assist in the Welty Foundation’s support of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) by cataloging and providing a guide to the department’s new acquisitions of Welty manuscripts, photographs and correspondence. At Millsaps, Marrs will design courses that introduce students to Welty’s fiction, bring contemporary writers to campus and provide opportunities for original student research. Beyond the campus, she will plan programs for teachers and high school students, organize scholarly conferences and schedule readings and lectures for the general public.

“I am excited about this opportunity,” Marrs said. “I’ll be able to work with correspondence and manuscripts that offer tremendous insight into Welty’s life and creative process. And I’ll be able to teach Welty’s fiction in new ways and in new venues.”

Welty had a long and close association with Millsaps College, where she taught creative writing and served on the Board of Trustees from 1977 until 1985, when she was named a Life Trustee.

Millsaps established the Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Studies in 1983. Interdisciplinary scholars who have occupied the Chair have included C. Vann Woodward, Cleanth Brooks, Will Campbell, Beth Henley, Ellen Douglas and others. Dr. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, a distinguished scholar of Southern literature, holds the Chair for the 2003–04 academic year. The Millsaps/Welty Foundation partnership will complement and enhance this current program.

Marrs believes the Millsaps/Welty Foundation partnership will foster research and writing about Welty. “Dan Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, says that scholarship drives the mission of his organization,” she said. “We hope that will be true here. Ongoing scholarship is very important in maintaining a writer’s reputation and making that writer’s works accessible to readers.”

Marrs received her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches courses in composition, 19th- and 20th-century American literature, and 20th-century Southern literature. Her research interests center on the American South and especially upon Welty. She has lectured on Welty’s fiction in this country, Russia and France, and was a consultant for a 1987 BBC documentary on the writer. 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. Marrs received the Phoenix Award for Outstanding Achievement in Eudora Welty Scholarship in 1998.