Harriet Pollack
Affiliate Professor of American Literature
Professor Pollack writes about 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 (University of Georgia Press, 2016), and the editor of several volumes, including these two: 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. Professor Pollack is now working on the topic of Eudora Welty's unpublished manuscripts, is preparing a co-edited volume on Welty, Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction, and working at a book on Eudora Welty's circles of friendship and in particular, her literary girlfriends.
- Pollack is currently serving as the Welty Society President (2018-2020)
- She served as Book Review Editor for Southern Literary Journal from 2008 until 2016 when that journal became South: a Scholarly Journal, She is now a member of its board of directors for South.
- She is currently planning and co-directing “The Continuous Thread of Revelation”: Eudora Welty Reconsidered, an international Welty Society conference to be held at the College of Charleston, February 21 to 23, 2019
- She planned and directed the Eudora Welty International Centennial Celebration Academic Conference, Welty at 100, 2009, (Jackson, MS) and before that, co-directed Home Ties, an International Welty Conference, (Jackson, MS) 1996.
- She has twice been elected to the board of the Society for The Study of Southern Literature (SSSL)
- She taught in the NEH program Eudora Welty's Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer's Imagination, 2008
Honors and Awards
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Pollack was the 2008 recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding scholarship, "given on occasion to an individual whose contributions to Welty studies have been exceptional."
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She received the Kirby Prize (Best Essay) from the South Central Modern Language Association for “Photographic Convention and Story Composition: Eudora Welty’s Use of Detail, Plot, Genre, And Expectation”
Publications
Books:
New Essays on Eudora Welty, Race, and Class, forthcoming
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).
Select Articles:
“Evolving Secrets: The Patterns of Eudora Welty’s Mysteries,” Detecting The South, Eds. Deborah Barker and Theresa Stuckey. (forthcoming)
“How She Wrote and How We Read: Teaching The Pleasure and Play of Welty's Modernist Techniques,” Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: 21st-Century Approaches, Eds. J Eichelberger & Miller, University Press Mississipp
“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 ––“the very best essays from 50 years of scholarship and thought,” 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.
"Reading John Robinson (and Eudora Welty)" in a special issue on Welty And Sexuality, Mississippi Quarterly.
"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.
"From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women's History and Southern Fiction" in Southern Literary Journal.
"Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience" in Eudora Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert Devlin, U Press Mississippi.