John W. Lowe, Ph.D., a noted Americanist specializing in Southern literature, Southern studies and humor, is the visiting Hurst Professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis the week of March 1.
Lowe, the Robert Penn Warren Professor of English and comparative literature at Louisiana State University (LSU), will give two lectures that are free and open to the public.
His talks, both at 4 p.m. in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, will focus on two books that he is completing.
His first talk on Tuesday, March 2, is titled
” ‘Listening to the Loas’: The Haitian Revolution’s Effect on Southern Literature.”
It will draw from “Calypso Magnolia: The Caribbean Side of the South,” in which he studies the connections between the American South and the Caribbean, particularly as evidenced in literature. A focus of this book is how Caribbean folklore, music and history made a deep impact on Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.
In his second talk on Thursday, March 4, Lowe will address “New Directions in Faulkner Scholarship.”
Lowe, who is president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, is writing “Faulkner’s Fraternal Fury: Sibling Rivalry, Racial Kinship, and Democracy,” a study of birth order and sibling rivalry.
He is the founding director since 2002 of LSU’s Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies. He has been instrumental in organizing LSU’s multidisciplinary program in Atlantic Studies.
Lowe’s research interests include African-American, Southern, Asian-American and multi-ethnic literature and theory as well as humor.
The author of “Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy” (1994), he is editor of “Conversations with Ernest Gaines” (1995); “The Future of Southern Letters,” (1996) with Jefferson Humphries; “Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach” (2005); “Louisiana Culture From the Colonial Era to Katrina” (2008); and “Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and Other Works” (2009). Another book in progress is “The Americanization of Ethnic Humor.”
He was president of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) from 1997-2000. While MELUS president, he helped found branch chapters in Europe and India. He received the society’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award for distinguished contributions to American ethnic literature.
His other awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, a senior Fulbright professorship at the University of Munich, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard University and a Fulbright Scholar award in India.
Lowe earned a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, a master’s degree from Georgia State University and a doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University.
He began teaching at LSU as an assistant professor in 1986 and has been a professor of English there since 1995.
For more information on his talks, call the Department of English at (314) 935-5190.