Anna Creadick
Anna G CreadickProfessor of English and Creative WritingGeorge E. Paulsen '49 Professor
Joined faculty in 2001
Ph.D., English/American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002
M.A., American Studies, Boston College, 1994
B.S., English and Education, Appalachian State University, 1991
Contact Information
Scholarly Interest
Twentieth-Century American Fiction
Southern and Appalachian Studies
American Studies/Cultural Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Post-World War II era (1940s-1970s)
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Courses Taught
Literature and Social Movements
American Women Writers
Southern Fictions
Popular Fiction
Modern American Literature
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Sexuality and American Literature
Reading Faulkner
From Comix to Graphix: The Art of Story
You Are Here: Geneva 101
Seeing Whiteness
Banned Books
Art of Memoir
Publications
Selected scholarship:
"
Tacky-lachian Dolly: Double-D Femme in the Double-Wide Mountain South" in THE TACKY SOUTH, Katharine Burnett and Monica Miller, eds. (LSU Press, 2022): https://southernreviewofbooks.com/2022/08/10/the-tacky-south-burnett-miller-review/
"On Appalachian Floods and Climate Grief," in THE EDGE, 10 Nov. 2022. Available: https://www.theedgemedia.org/appalachian-floods-climate-grief/
Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America, Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Reviewed in Choice, American Literary History, Journal of American History.
- "What a powerful book! Anna Creadick convincingly demonstrates all the complexities and contradictions of the postwar American drive to create perfectly average citizens. . . . Her work brilliantly shows how ideals are enforced--and can be changed." — Review by John Howard, author of Men Like That: A Southern Queer History
Film Advisor, Hillbilly, award-funded NEH-funded documentary film (2018). http://hillbillymovie.com/
"Banjo Boy: Masculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance," in Southern Cultures special issue on "Appalachia." May 2017. http://www.southerncultures.org/article/banjo-boy-masculinity-disability-difference-deliverance/
"Gendered Terrain: Middlebrow Authorship at Midcentury," Post-45 Peer Reviewed. 1 July 2016. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/07/the-middlebrow-a-special-cluster/
"Disability's Other: The Production of 'Normal Men' in Midcentury America," in Phallacies: Historical Constructions of Masculinity and Disability, ed. James Trent and Kathleen Brian, edited collection, Oxford University Press, 2017. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/phallacies-9780190458997?cc=us&lang=en&#
“Reading Faulkner’s Readers: Reputation and the Postwar Reading Revolution,” in Faulkner and History: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2014, ed. Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 158–76. 2017. https://www.amazon.com/Faulkner-History-Yoknapatawpha-Jay-Watson/dp/1496809971
Guest Editor "Teaching Popular Culture," a special issue of transFORMATIONS: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. Winter 2013/Spring2014.
"The AppalJ of My Eye: From Appalachian Studies to American Studies, and Back.” Appalachian Journal 40.3 (spring 2014), 1-8.
with Jalisa Whitley, Patrice Thomas, Amber Jackson, Katy Wolfe, Martin Quigley, and Reina Apraez, “‘Check Your Head’: Teaching and Learning the Intersectionality of Whiteness,” in Teaching, Learning, and Intersecting Identities in Higher Education, eds. Cerri Banks and Susan Pliner (New York: Peter Lang), 2012. 69-84
"The Erasure of Grace: Reconnecting Peyton Place to its Author" MOSAIC: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42.4 (December 2009), 165-80.
"Postwar Sign, Symbol, and Symptom: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," in Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960, eds. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis, Marina Moskovitz. (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), 277-293.
"Location, Location, Location: A Response to Cold Mountain," Appalachian Journal, 31:3-4 (Spring/Summer 2004), 327-332+.
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
American Studies Association
Appalachian Studies Association
Society for the Study of Southern Literature
Reception Studies Society
PERSONAL STATEMENT
Because my background is in American Studies, I bring an interdisciplinary and historicist approach to the study of literary texts. I am interested in studying literature as culture and as history. I am interested in the power relationships embedded in the reading and the writing of books, as well as the power relationships embedded in the tales between their covers. In my scholarship, I gravitate towards studying books that made a deep cultural impact, rather than books that are considered (by some) to be "great" or "classic." And in my courses, I work to shake up literary and other hierarchies by teaching famous authors alongside more marginalized ones, by interrogating all of our assumptions, and by keeping students active participants in the collective production of knowledge. I love my job, because literary study allows us (requires us, really) to sustain critical conversations about identity, difference, and justice.