John A. Burrison is Regents Professor of English and director of the Folklore Curriculum at Georgia State University. He is also curator of the Atlanta History Museum’s Folklife Gallery and of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee. Besides traditional ceramics, his research interests include the folk cultures of the American South and British Isles, traditional storytelling, and literary uses of folklore.
James C. Cobb is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor in the History of the American South at the University of Georgia. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Southern history and culture—and among the first to write broadly about the South in a global context. Cobb has published fourteen books and more than forty articles, mostly about the impact of changing economic conditions on the South. His newest book, The New America: The South and the Nation Since World War II, was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. Cobb is a former president of the Southern Historical Association.
Brennan Collins is associate director of Writing Across the Curriculum and the Center for Instructional Innovation at Georgia State University. He teaches courses on African American and Multi-Ethnic U.S. literatures. His scholarship explores African American literary perspectives on the South, often comparing and contrasting oral storytelling with written literary production.
Glenn T. Eskew has taught Southern history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His But For Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (1997) offered the first scholarly analysis of Birmingham’s climatic protest in 1963 and received the Francis Butler Simkins Prize of the Southern Historical Association. He published two edited volumes on Southern history topics, Paternalism in a Southern City and Labor in the Modern South (both in 2001). His forthcoming biography, Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World, considers the hybridity of culture by placing the lyricist of “Moon River” and other popular hits into the context of the southern diaspora while also engaging transnational music in the age of American hegemony. Eskew has lectured in Japan, Korea, Argentina, and South Africa.
Daniel P. Franklin is an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Franklin specializes in the politics of the American presidency. He also teaches courses on economic justice in the American context, film and politics and American government, and Georgia state politics. He is currently working on a book titled, Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their Final Terms. He is also author of Extraordinary Measures: Prerogative Powers in the United States, Making Ends Meet: Congressional Budgeting in the Age of Deficits, and Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States.
Pearl McHaney is associate professor of American and Southern literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is the creator and editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer, winner of the Eudora Welty Prize; Occasions: Selected Writings by Eudora Welty; Eudora Welty: Contemporary Reviews; A Writer’s Eye: Collected Reviews by Eudora Welty; and the Eudora Welty Review, an annual peer-reviewed journal. She has also lectured and published on works by William Faulkner, Barry Hannah, David Mamet, Sindiwe Magona, Alice Munro, Natasha Trethewey, and Tennessee Williams.
Dorit Wagner received her M.A. in American studies, economics and French from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. As part of her research for her M.A. thesis she embarked on a civil rights tour through the Southern states. Currently she is working on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Mainz.
Elizabeth J. West is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University. West received her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University. She focuses on gender, race and class, with particular interest in how these issues inform representations of the spiritual in early American and African American literary works. In addition to essays in anthologies, she has published articles in CLA, J MELUS, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, SLI, and South Central Review. Her book project, African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction, is forthcoming (December 2011). She is currently working on a co-edited collection of critical works on African spirituality in the black Atlantic.
