New Faculty Profile: Jennifer Greeson

To Assistant Professor Jennifer Greeson, the most important question about the U.S. South is not where it begins but when.  Her first book, Our South: Region, World, and the Rise of a National Literature, which will be published by Harvard University Press next year, proposes that the idea of a “South” different from, yet integral to the United States arose with the very formation of the nation itself in the 1770s, 80s and 90s.  The complex of traits understood to typify this “South”—semitropical climate, plantation production, and heterogeneous population drawn from Africa, America, and Europe—had, for more than a century prior to the American Revolution, defined the entirety of the New World from the perspective of Europe.  By founding U.S. literature through opposition to their South, U.S. writers and readers imagined a nation truly new to the face of the earth, both free of the taint of colonial inferiority, and innocent of the imperial system from which it had sprung.  Establishing the South as a primary site of connection between the United States and the rest of the world in the late 18^th century, the book goes on to track the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature across the 19^thcentury, taking into account works by more than two dozen major authors and genres including travel writing, gothic novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, social-problem novels, abolitionist address, “local color” fiction, and historical romance.

Greeson joined the Department of English as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2008. A North Carolina native, she earned her BA in English from Duke University in 1994. She did her doctoral work in the American Studies Program at Yale University, where she was trained by both literary critics and cultural historians; her approach to literary study continues to incorporate the perspectives of each of these disciplines.  During a two-year residence at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, Greeson taught in the Literature Humanities (“great books”) curriculum; she then became an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, as well as an affiliated faculty member with their Center for African and African-American Studies there.  As she is seeing Our Southinto print, she is also preparing, with Professor Robert Stepto of Yale, a Norton Critical Edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s brilliant “conjure stories,” set in eastern North Carolina and written between 1887 and 1924—works that are crucial for both African American and Southern literary studies.  Greeson is also contributing chapters to the new Cambridge History of the American Novel (“Imagining the South”) and Oxford History of the Novel in English (“Fictions of Colonial America and the Puritan Past”), and she is gearing up for her next book project, The Prehistory of Possessive Individualism: Chattel Slavery, Political Theory, Autobiography, which makes a case for the centrality of the slave system to the formation of the modern liberal individual.

In her first year at UVa, Greeson taught a graduate course in Early American Literature and an undergraduate course in Southern Literature.  Early American Literature focused on the American literary tradition as a phenomenon of mythmaking, on the one hand tracing and mapping the birth and early development of literature written from the perspective of British North America from pre-European settlement through the early Republic, and on the other hand becoming cognizant of the twentieth-century critical construction of that canon.  With her undergraduates, Professor Greeson asked her students to read through the “long twentieth century, starting with the end of local-color fiction and moving through modernism, mid-century fiction, and the postmodern, ‘postsouthern’ novel” all while bearing in mind that the nation not only produces culture on a regional level, but that cultural representations of region have national and international socio-political ties.  “And although our focus is on the development of prose fiction,” Greeson says, “we pay some attention at the beginning of every class to the evolution of music out of the south, sometimes stopping to close-read song lyrics; we also are watching and analyzing several films, from classic Hollywood to recent releases”—a cross-genre focus that gives students a broader and more grounded understanding of Southern cultural production.  

Next year, Greeson will be co-teaching, with recent hire Brad Pasanek, the English Department’s transatlantic and comparative long eighteenth- and nineteenth-century survey course, the second in a series of the three chronological surveys required of all undergraduate English majors.  Looking forward to the prospect of this course, she remarks, “Brad and I are both really excited about having a truly transatlantic eighteenth-century course, co-taught by an Americanist and an eighteenth-century British literature specialist, as a centerpiece of the Department’s offerings—it is something that attracted both of us to the Department’s curriculum.”