Dr. Veronica WatsonProfessor

Director of Graduate Studies in Literature and Criticism

Office: 506C Leonard
Phone: 724-357-4072
Email: Veronica.Watson@iup.edu

Professional Biography: PDF | Word (docx)

Education

PhD, Rice University, 1997

Academic Interests

  • The literature of white estrangement/white life fiction
  • Nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature and culture
  • Critical whiteness studies
  • Twentieth-century American fiction
  • Southern literary studies
  • Nineteenth-century discourses on race and citizenship

Publications

  • The Short Stories of Frank Yerby. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.
  • "Blackness, Wartime Masculinity, and the Protest Tradition in Frank Yerby's Short Fiction." Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays. Ed. Matthew Teutsch. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 68-88.
  • "Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death." Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about their Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes. Ed. George Yancy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
  • Watson, Veronica and Becky Thompson. "Theorizing White Racial Trauma and its Remedies" (Co-authored with Becky Thompson). Unveiling Whiteness in the 21st Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions. 2015.
  • Unveiling Whiteness in the 21st Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions. Lead Editor, with Deirdre Howard-Wagner and Lisa SpaniermanLanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
  • The Souls of White Folks:African American Writers Theorize Whiteness. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2013
  • "Lillian B. Horace and the Literature of White Estrangement: Rediscovering an African American Intellectual of the Jim Crow Era." Mississippi Quarterly.(Winter 2011):3-23.
  • "Demythologizing Whiteness in Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow." Journal of Ethnic American Literature 1 (2011): 92-110.
  • "The Next Step: Teach(ing) an African American Counter-Narrative to Whiteness." Teaching Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education: Perspectives from North America. Emily Horowitz, ed. 2008.

Courses Taught

  • ENGL 674: Research Trends in English
  • ENGL 760-860 Teaching College Literature
  • ENGL 761-861 Topics in American Literature before 1870: Narrating Slavery in Nineteenth Century America; Douglass, Melville and Stowe: Three American Classics
  • ENGL 762/862 Topics in American Literature since 1870: Re-Framing the Southern Literary Tradition: a Dialogue in White and Black; American Whiteness
  • ENGL 772/872 Women's Literature: The Politics of African-American Women's Writing; Reconsidering Southern Women's Writing; Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women Writers
  • ENGL 773/873 Topics in Minority Literature: The Autobiographical "I"/Eye; (W)Rites of Passing: Narratives of Shifting African American Identities; Narrating Slavery
  • ENGL 955 The History and Theory of Criticism