Kathryn McKee

Kathryn McKee is Center Director and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.  She is co-editor, with Deborah Barker, of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, and her articles have appeared in various journals, including American Literature, Legacy, Southern Literary Journal, and Mississippi Quarterly.  She has a PhD in American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Dr. McKee’s areas of scholarly research include nineteenth-century American literature, the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century U.S. South, writing by women, global south studies, film studies, and humor studies.

Education

Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1996)
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1989)
B.A. Centre College (1987)

Teaching and Research Interests

• Southern literature
• American literature before 1900
• Writing by Women
• Humor Studies

Selected Publications

• “Sherwood Bonner and the Postbellum Legacy of Southwestern Humor.”  In Beyond Southern Frontier Humor: Prospects and Possibilities, Ed Piacentino, ed.  Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013.  104-130.
• American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary. Co-edited with Deborah Barker.
  Athens: University of Georgia Press, New Southern Studies Series, 2011.
• “The South in Film.” Co-edited with Deborah Barker.  Special issue of Mississippi
  Quarterly, Summer-Fall 2010, 63.3-4.
• “’the silence which/Smothers you’: Kaye Gibbons’s On the Occasion of My Last
  Afternoon.”  in Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today, Ed. Jan Nordby Gretlund.
  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.  43-57.
• “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.”  Co-edited with
  Annette Trefzer.  Special issue of American Literature, 78.4 (2006).
• “Writing Region from ‘the Hub’: Sherwood Bonner’s Travel Letters and Questions of
  Postbellum U.S. Southern Identity,” Legacy 22.2 (2005): 126-143.
• The Forgotten World of Idora McClellan Moore’s Betsy Hamilton Letters.”Studies in American Humor, 3.10 (2003). 65-76.
• “‘Honey, yer ain’t harf as smart as yer thinks yer is!’: Race and Humor in Sherwood Bonner’s Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 35.1 (Fall 2002), 28-46.
• “The Portable Eclipse: Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Scribbling Women.”Faulkner and America: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1998. Eds. Ann Abadie and Joseph Urgo. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
• Finding Bobbie Ann Mason’s Present in Her Past.” Southern Literay Journal31.1 (Fall 1998): 35-50.
• “Simply Talking: Women and Language in Kaye Gibbons’s A Cure for Dreams.”Southern Quarterly 35.4 (Summer 1997): 97-106.
• “‘A fearful price I have had to pay for loving him’: Ellery Channing’s Troubled Relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Studies in the American Renaissance(1994): 251-269.
• “‘A small heap of glittering fragments’: Hawthorne’s Disillusionment with the Short Story.” American Transcendental Quarterly 8.2 (June 1994): 137-147.
• “Rewriting Southern Male Introspection in Josephine Humphreys’s Dreams of Sleep.” Mississippi Quarterly 46.2 (Spring 1993): 241-254.