Title: Professor

Department: English

Office: 320 Benson Hall
Phone: 322-2370
Home Phone: not listed
Fax: 343-8028
Email: michael.p.kreyling@vanderbilt.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Degrees

• B.A. Thomas More College (1970); M.A. and Ph.D. Cornell University (1974,1975).

Research Area

• American Literature, Southern Literature.

Current Research

• Southern Literature and memory; photography and the meaning of authorship in modern American Literature.

Current Courses

• On Leave, Fall 2012.

Current Positions

• Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.

Previous Positions

• Tulane University (1977-85)
• Mississippi State University(1975-77)

Professional Societies

• Modern Language Association, American Literature Association, Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Professional Honors

• Fulbright Professor of American Studies, University of Naples, 1994; Phoenix Award, Eudora Welty Society, 1999; President, Society for the Study of Southern Literature, 2010-12.

Publications

• Understanding Eudora Welty (U of South Carolina Press, 1999); Ed. Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir and Welty: Complete Novels (Library of America, 1998); Inventing Southern Literature (UP of Mississippi, 1998); Ed.New Essays on Wise Blood (Cambridge UP, 1994); Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1991); The South That Wasn't There (LSU Press, 2011).
• Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Louisiana UP, 1986)
• Eudora Welty's Acievement of Order (Louisiana UP, 1980)

Biography

Michael Kreyling received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1975. Before coming to Vanderbilt in 1985, he taught at Mississippi State University and Tulane University. At Vanderbilt, he teaches classes in twentieth century American literature; Southern literature; American and Southern studies; and the works of authors such as Faulkner, Welty, and Wright.

He is the author of six books, which include Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (1986), Understanding Eudora Welty (1999), and Inventing Southern Literature (1998), which won the Eudora Welty Prize. He has also published numerous articles, primarily on Southern literature from the antebellum period up through the twentieth century, in journals such as the Southern Review, Southern Quarterly, and American Literary History.

He is currently working on a book that explores the cultural politics of memory in representations of the South through an examination of re-enacted memory in latter-day versions of the Civil War, the construction of white liberal southern-ness in post-Civil Rights fiction and works by authors such as Robert Penn Warren and W.E.B. Dubois. He is also working on a study of the work of the detective novelist Kenneth Millar (1915-83), who wrote under the pseudonym “Ross Macdonald.” The book includes analyses of Millar’s use of autobiography founded upon the Freudian model of self-analysis and his understanding of the cultural and literary history of the detective novel.