Faculty Directory - Bio
T. Scott Herring
Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies
Contact:
165 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-865-6409
tsh12@psu.edu
www.personal.psu.edu/tsh12
Office Hours:
On Leave
Scott Herring is an assistant professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State University . His research and teaching interests range from twentieth-century American literature to rural/regional studies to studies of gender and sexuality. He has published numerous articles in journals such as PMLA , Arizona Quarterly , Modern Fiction Studies , GLQ , and Public Culture . His first book, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History , is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2007, and he is currently completing his second project, Another Country: Rural Stylistics and the Politics of Queer Anti-Urbanism. Publications: Books
- Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay
- History . Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007.
- Another Country: Rural Stylistics and the Politics of Queer Anti-Urbanism . In progress.
Edited works
- Editor, “Regional Modernisms.” Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): forthcoming.
- Scholary Edition of Autobiography of an Androgyne . 1919. By Ralph Werther (Earl Lind-Jennie June). 30 page Introduction with 15 pages of Explanatory Notes. Piscataway , N.J. : Rutgers University Press. Part of Subterranean Lives: Chronicles of Alternative America Series. Forthcoming.
- Editor and Introduction. “ Brokeback Mountain Dossier.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1 (2007): 93-109.
Articles
- “On the Frontera of the Midwest : An Illegal Interview.” Under consideration at Radical History Review.
- “Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD , Country Women , and the Post-Stonewall
- Emergence of Anti-Urban Queer Print Culture.” Revise and resubmit at American Quarterly .
- “ Eastaboga 's Taormina .” Part of Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?: A Forum on Rural Queer Studies , edited by John Howard. American Studies . Forthcoming.
- “Keith Haring and Queer Xerography.” Public Culture 19.2 (2007): forthcoming.
- “Catherian Friendship; Or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006): 66-91.
- “Caravaggio's Rednecks.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.2 (2006): 217-236.
- Special issue on “Art Works” edited by Richard Meyer and David Román.
- “ Spoon River Anthology 's Heterosexual Heartland.” Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 256-269.
- “Willa Cather's Lost Boy: ‘Paul's Case' and Bohemian Tramping.” Arizona Quarterly 60.2 (2004): 87-116.
- “Frank O'Hara's Open Closet.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America ( PMLA ) 117.3 (2002): 414-27.
- “Makeovers: Regional Universalism and the Newer South's Public Spheres.” The Southern Quarterly 41.1 (2002): 87-105.
- “The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity.” African American Review 35.4 (2001): 581-98.
- “Cruising.” In Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender . Edited by Fedwa Matli Douglas, Judith Roof, et al. Farmington Hills , MI : Macmillan, forthcoming.
- “Cher .” In Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture . Edited by David A. Gerstner.
- London , New York : Routledge, 2006. 141.
- “Cruise.” In Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture . Edited by David A. Gerstner.
- London , New York : Routledge, 2006. 163.
- “Charles Henri Ford.” In Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture . Edited by David
- A. Gerstner. London , New York : Routledge, 2006. 221.
- Review of Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race .
- Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 6.1 (2001): 157-61.
- Honors, Grants, and Awards:
- Faculty Research Released Time Fellowship, Penn State , 2006
- Faculty Research Summer Fellowship, Penn State , 2004
- Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, 2004-2007 (declined)
- Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Graduate College, Illinois, 2003-2004
- Dissertation Travel Grant, Graduate College , Illinois , 2003
- Modern Language Association Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
- Transgender, and Queer Studies. Honorable Mention. Awarded to “Frank O'Hara's Open Closet.” PMLA , 2002
- Outstanding Teacher's Award. Nomination. Illinois , 2002
- List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, Illinois , 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
- University Fellowship, Graduate College, Illinois, 2002-2003
- English Department Fellowship, Illinois , 2002-2003
- English Department Summer Research Travel Grant , Illinois , Summer 2002
- “Highest Distinction” for Completion of M.A., Illinois , 2001
- University of California , Berkeley Summer Research Institute Fellow, 2000
- Distinguished University Fellowship, Graduate College, Illinois, 1998-2001
Invited Lectures
- “Critical Rusticity.” The University at Buffalo , April 2007.
- “Anti-Sapphic Modernism.” Indiana University , November 2006.
- “Country Women” and “Rethinking Queer Urbanity.” SUNY-Albany, February 2006.
- “Compulsory Homosexuality.” University of Tennessee , Knoxville , April 2004.
- “‘Slightly Known Territory': The Van Vechten School and Transatlantic Admixture.” Penn State University , January 2004.
- “Queering Family in ‘Sonny's Blues'.” Dickinson College , January 2004.
- “Catherian Friendship; or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality.” University of Nebraska , Lincoln, January 2004.
- “The Van Vechten School and Queer Admixture.” University of Connecticut , December 2003.
Recent Selected Presentations:
- “Reconceiving Regional Modernisms.” Chair and Organizer. Panelists include John Duvall, Geneva Gano, and Guy Reynolds. Modernist Studies Association. Tulsa , October 2006.
- “Country Women.” American Studies Association. Oakland , October 2006.
- “Secrets of the African American Bisexual Man.” New Directions in African-American Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies Conference. Indiana University , April 2006.
- “Blackness and Postmodernism.” Chair. New Directions in African-American Literature, Theory, and Cultural Studies Conference. Indiana University , April 2006.
- “Underworlds and American Modernisms.” Co-organizer. Panelists included Shane Vogel and Jonathan Eburne. Modern Language Association. Washington , D.C. , December 2005.
- “The Mysteries of Nightwood .” Modern Language Association. Washington , D.C. , December 2005.
- “Caravaggio's Rednecks.” Comparative Literature Luncheon. Penn State University , November 2005.
- “Studies in Sexuality.” Chair and Organizer. Annual Fall English Conference. Penn State University , November 2005.
- “Michael Meads and the Spectacle of Southern ‘Backwardness'.” American Studies Association. Washington , D.C. , November 2005.
- “Michael Meads and the Spectacle of Sexual Immaturity.” Narrative: An International Conference. University of Louisville , April 2005.
- “Always Ahistoricize!: Rethinking Queer Narrative.” Chair and Organizer. Panelists included Michael Cobb and Travis Foster. Narrative: An International Conference. Louisville , April 2005.
- “Narrative Slumming.” American Comparative Literature Association. Penn State University , March 2005
- “Djuna Barnes's Eternal Incognitos.” Modernist Studies Association. Vancouver , October 2004.
- “Queer Regionalism and ‘ Brokeback Mountain '.” U.S. Cultural Studies Conference. Boston , October 2004.
- “Queer Friendship, Queer Regionalism.” Narrative: An International Conference. University of Vermont , April 2004.
- “Black Queer Studies: ‘Friendship Beyond Understanding'.” New Directions in African-American Theory, Criticism, and Cultural Studies Conference. Illinois , March 2003.
- “Cosmopolitan Slumming, Sexuality, and Twenty Years at Hull-House .” Modernist Studies Association. University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 2002.
- “Personal Exposures: Privacy and Publicity in the Modern Autobiographical Novel.” Organizer. Panelists included Michael Cobb and Rochelle Rives. Narrative: An International Conference. Rice University , October 2001.
- “The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity.” Narrative: An International Conference. Rice University , October 2001.
- “ ‘All Terror Is Local Now': Underworld , Trauma, and the Postmodern Sublime.” SAMLA. Birmingham , October 2000.
- “Return to Sender: Frank O'Hara's Personal Poetics.” Rethinking the Avant-Garde: Between Politics and Aesthetics Conference. University of Notre Dame, November 2000.
Course Descriptions:
“Masculinities and Modern American Literature”
What did—and does—it take to make or unmake a “man” in modern U.S. literatures and cultures? It's a deceptively simple question that will guide our readings as we map competing representations of “masculinities” across the first third of the twentieth-century and beyond. Along the way, we will chart how vexed ideas about maleness, manhood, and masculinity provided rough-riding presidents, High Modern novelists, Provincetown playwrights, queer regionalists, star-struck inverts, surly bohemians, and others with a means to negotiate—and gender—the cultural and political turmoil that constituted modern American life.
“Regional U.S. Modernisms”
What kind of read would The Great Gatsby be if you concentrated more on its Midwest and less on its East Egg? It is a question that studies in American modernism have yet to address, let alone answer. Over the last decade, much has been made about the turn to critical globality in modernist scholarship. Keywords and key phrases such as “international,” “diaspora,” “cosmopolitanism,” “geomodernism,” “transnationalism,” and “the global city” now direct many of the more influential critiques in this ever-burgeoning field. Much less, however, has been made with instances of what could be called “regional modernism.” While scholars have often relegated twentieth-century regional modernism to isolated case studies—Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and The Southern Agrarian immediately come to mind—we will re-situate this discourse of periphery at the epicenter of modern U.S. literary and cultural production. To do so, we begin with a lengthy dossier on regionality, globality, and modernity in order to establish a base-line critical vocabulary for our investigations. Turning from the inter-national to the intra-national, we then course through a casebook of modernist sites that looks to regional modernities in various U.S. geographies, including the Midwest, the Deep South , and the Southwest. Just as regional modernism pushes beyond and against these set geographic parameters, we will explore how the language of regionalism was deployed by a variety of North American moderns for a variety of disparate ends—queer anti-urban artists in Pennsylvania Amish country, imperial explorations of the Artic on film, down-home ethnographies of rural Georgia, High Modern lyric poetry by a Brazilian-based artist from Nova Scotia, and the perverse suburbanization of the regional aesthetic in post-WWII New Jersey and Depression Era New Hampshire. Along the way, we'll track the productive aporias that regionalism produced for American modernism as we remap the conventional cartographies of what counts—back then and still now—for a truly modernist study of the United States beyond the globe.
