The second annual Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies will take place on Monday, March 21st at 7PM in the Bondurant Auditorium. The speaker is Dr. Sharon P. Holland, the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her lecture is titled “How to Tell a Story about a Horse.”
The Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies is funded by the same endowment that sponsors the Howry Professorship of English, currently held by Jay Watson, and was created to honor the generosity of the Howry family and to continue the study of William Faulkner’s works here at the University. Each year, the Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies brings a southern literature expert to speak to English faculty, students, and alumni and to start a discussion among the community. “To lure Sharon Holland to the Faulkner studies podium from her brilliant work on Blackness, sexuality, and posthumanism represents a real coup for the English department, the University, and this lecture series. Our audience is in for a real treat: a breathtakingly original thinker at the top of her game, and doubtless with surprises in store, ” says Dr. Watson.
Dr. Holland is a graduate of Princeton University (1986) and holds a PhD in English and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1992). She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), which won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2002. She is also co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, UM, Ann Arbor) entitled Crossing Waters/ Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Holland is also responsible for bringing a feminist classic, The Queen is in the Garbage by Lila Karp to the attention of The Feminist Press for publication (2007). She is the author of The Erotic Life of Racism (Duke University Press, 2012), a theoretical project that explores the intersection of Critical Race, Feminist, and Queer Theory.
Professor Holland’s next project, “an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life,” an investigation of the human/animal distinction and the place of discourse on blackness within that discussion, is under contract with Duke University Press. You can see her work on food, writing and all things equestrian on her blog, https://theprofessorstable.org/.
For more information or if you require assistance relating to a disability, please contact the University of Mississippi Department of English at msgilmo1@olemiss.edu or 662.915.7439.
