Harriet Pollack

Harriet Pollack writes about and teaches courses that consider the body in Southern Literature and photography in the contexts of Southern history and cultural trauma. She is the author of Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman. She is also theeditor of several volumes, including Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, and with Christopher Metress, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, a book about the racial murder that began the civil rights movement.

Educational Background

• Ph.D., University of Virginia

Teaching Interests

• American literature with specializations in southern literature
• William Faulkner and Eudora Welty
• American women writers
• Issues of whiteness and other topics concerning race in American history and literature
• Visual culture
• Body studies
• Modernism
• Cultural studies
• Reading theory

Scholarly Interests

Much the same

Current Projects

• New Essays on Welty, Race, and Class
• Professor Pollack is now working on the topic of Welty's unpublished manuscripts, and on the topic of Welty's literary girlfriends.
• Professor Pollack is currently serving as the Welty Society Vice President (2016-2018). She also planned and directed the Eudora Welty International Centennial Celebration Academic Conference, Welty at 100, 2009, (Jackson, MS). In addition, she has twice been elected to the board of the Society for The Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) and taught in the summer NEH program "Eudora Welty's Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer's Imagination."

Recent Awards

• Recipient of the Phoenix Award for 2008, "given on occasion to an individual whose contributions to Welty studies have been exceptional."

Selected Publications

Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman (UGAP, 2016).

Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race (UGAP, 2013).

Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (w/ Christopher Metress, LSU, 2007).

Eudora Welty and Politics; Did the Writer Crusade (w/ Suzanne Marrs, LSU, 2001).

Having Our Way: Women Rewriting The Tradition in Twentieth-Century America (1995).

"On Welty's Use of Allusion" in Eudora Welty, ed. Harold Bloom (also reprinted in The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly and in The Critical Response To Eudora Welty, ed Laurie Champion).

'You make a joke like that and you jes part of the problem' — Grotesque Laughter, Unburied Bodies, and History: Shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle," Mississippi Quarterly, Winter-Spring 2008.

"Reading John Robinson." Welty And Sexuality, Mississippi Quarterly, Spring 2003.

"Photographic Convention And Story Composition: Eudora Welty's Use of Detail, Plot, Genre, And Expectation From "A Worn Path" Through Bride of The Innisfallen," South Central Review, Summer 1997.

"From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women's History and Southern Fiction" in Southern Literary Journal, Spring 1996.

"Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience" in Eudora Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert Devlin, U Press Mississippi.