Ted Atkinson is an Assistant Professor of English who joined the MSU faculty in 2009. His primary area of research and teaching interest is literature and culture of the U.S. South; other areas of specialization include U.S. literature and culture from the late 19th century to the present, historical approaches to literature and film, and the influence of politics on works of literature and film. A native Mississippian, Atkinson returned to the state after twelve years. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University in 2001 and then moved to Augusta, Georgia, where he taught for six years at Augusta State University—first as a visiting faculty member and then as an Assistant Professor of English.
Atkinson has taught a variety of courses related to his areas of specialization: Survey of Southern Literature, U.S. Literature and Culture of the 1930s, Major Authors: Faulkner and Morrison, Humor in Southern Literature, American Politics in Film, and Survey of American Literature II, among others. He has also taught courses in composition, modern American drama, and world humanities.
Atkinson is author of the book Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics, which was published by the University of Georgia Press in December 2006. This study offers the first comprehensive examination of how the Great Depression influenced the major phase of Faulkner’s literary production. Atkinson’s study has received favorable reviews in Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, The Southern Literary Journal, and American Literature. Atkinson was invited to write a chapter on Faulkner’s literary responses to state authority for A Companion to William Faulkner, edited by Richard Moreland and published by Blackwell in 2007. Atkinson’s essays on William Faulkner have appeared in The Faulkner Journal, and he published an essay on John Faulkner in Mississippi Quarterly. His essay on Erskine Caldwell and Larry Brown in the context of Southwestern Humor was published in Studies in American Humor.
Atkinson is currently at work on a book-length manuscript entitled State of a Nation: Reconstruction, Resistance, and the Cultural Production of Mississippi in the Long Civil Rights Movement, a study of how Mississippi came to represent intractable white supremacy and segregation in American culture and how selected Mississippi authors have responded to the stigmatized representation of the state. Examining a range of novels and films in historical and cultural context, Atkinson counters the dominant cultural narrative of Mississippi as a “closed society” far removed from the nation and the world. Instead, Atkinson offers a model of complex negotiations and associations, driven to a significant degree by Mississippi writers, that reveals the state (in material and symbolic forms) as a pulse point for the nation useful in measuring the immediate effects of signal historical and cultural developments during what some historians have called “the long Civil Rights Movement.”Selected Publications
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Ted Atkinson Univ. of Georgia Press |
