Faculty
Jeanne Hamming
Assistant Professor of English
PhD, West Virginia University, 2003
MA, West Virginia University, 1997
BA, Grand Valley State University, 1995
Specialities: Contemporary American literature, literature of the environment, cyberculture and multimedia
Jeanne Hamming’s research and teaching interests reside at the intersections of American literature, ecology, and new media. Her interdisciplinary interests have led her to draw on cultural studies, gender studies, and new media theory to inform both her teaching and scholarship.
Phone: 318.869.5082
Email:
http://personal.centenary.edu/~jhamming
David Havird
Professor of English
PhD, University of Virginia, 1986.
MA, University of South Carolina, 1976
BA, University of South Carolina, 1974
Specialties: 19th- and 20th-century British literature, Southern literature, poetry, creative writing
David Havird's courses include seminars on the novels of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and on the English lyric. Among the "towering dead," Hardy is his favorite poet as well as novelist. Among more recent poets, James Dickey, whom Dr. Havird remembers in an essay available online at the Virginia Quarterly Review, is a special favorite. Other prose publications include articles on Flannery O'Connor (Mississippi Quarterly) and Elizabeth Spencer (VQR). A featured poet at Poetry Daily, Dr. Havird has poems published or forthcoming in Agni, the New Yorker, Poetry, the Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Phone: 318.869.5085
Email:
http://personal.centenary.edu/~dhavird
Jeff Hendricks
Professor of English and Chair of the Department
PhD, University of Illinois, 1983
MA, University of Illinois, 1976
BA, Centenary College, 1975
Specialties: Modern American literature and culture, film studies, visual culture
Jeff Hendricks's research focuses on the intersection of American literature and progressive politics during the early and mid 20th century and he has published four books related to the American involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Current research includes a project on literature and left politics in the Deep South and a biography of the poet Edwin Rolfe. Dr. Hendricks teaches a wide range of courses, including Introduction to Visual Culture, Film History, Screenwriting, and Contemporary Literature. As founder and advisor to the Centenary Film Society, he helps program nightly showings of independent, foreign, and classic films at Centenary.
Phone: 318.869.5086
Email:
http://personal.centenary.edu/~jhendric
Earle Labor
George A. Wilson Professor of American Literature; Director, Jack London Research Center
PhD, University of Wisconsin, 1961
MA, Southern Methodist University, 1952
BA, Southern Methodist University, 1949
Specialties: Late 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, literary criticism
Co-author of the internationally renowned Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (Oxford UP), Earle Labor has also served as President of the College English Association and Editor of The CEA Critic. He is perhaps best known (in the recent words of a Danish professor) as "the maestro of Jack London scholarship," having inaugurated seminars in both Europe and the United States featuring "America's greatest world author." In addition to more than fifty articles and eight books on this famous author, including the widely reviewed Stanford editions of London's letters and short stories, he has published essays on such major figures as Henry James, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. He has been twice honored as Centenary's Outstanding Teacher; the numerous awards and published works of his academic proteges attest to the success of his mentoring.
Michael A. Laffey
Lecturer in English & Communication
MA, University of Florida,1997
BA, University of Minnesota, 1993
Specialty: Cultural studies and digital communication
Michael Laffey is currently putting the finishing touches on his dissertation in English at the University of Florida. His research focuses on popular culture; how it shapes, directs, and informs our encounters with a world in transition. Though born and raised in the cold, dark reaches of the Great White North, Professor Laffey has an unbounded passion for life in the South.
George Newtown
Professor of English
PhD, Yale University, Comparative Literature, 1979
MPhil, Yale University, 1972
BA, University of Arkansas, 1969
Specialities: Autobiography and personal essay
George Newtown teaches essay writing, autobiography, postcolonial literature, and theater history. In the past few years he has carved out a niche as a scholar writing about intersections between his life and his scholarship. His personal essay “Voir Dire” won The Dallas Morning News 2006 Nonfiction Prize for Literary Excellence. Other excerpts from his essay collection on the effects of prostate cancer on male identity, Man Enough, won him designation as a finalist in the 2007 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Program. Recent pieces have appeared in The Southern Review, Soundings, a/b: (auto)biography studies, Angelaki, and Ten Spurs: Best of the Best. Centenary gave him the Outstanding Teacher Award for 1999-2000.
Steve Shelburne
Professor of English
PhD, University of Connecticut, 1987
MA, Claremont Graduate School, 1979
BA, Furman University, 1978
Specialty: Medieval and Early Modern literature
Steve Shelburne teaches Shakespeare, Medieval and Early Modern English Literature, the Survey of British Literature, Shakespeare on Film, and The Arts of Representation. A dedicated interdisciplinarian, he has taught courses cross-listed in English, Art, Philosophy, Religion, and Theatre, as well as the pioneering internet courses History of Ideas Online and Medium and Message: Reading Culture Through Art and Artifact. His favorite courses are the first-year seminars, where students are introduced to the ideals of liberal education.
Jennifer Strange
Lecturer of English and Coordinator of Communications for the President's Office
MFA, University of Florida, 2001
BA, Centenary College, 1999
Specialty: Poetry writing
Jennifer Strange teaches writing and its accoutrements: poetry, advertising, magazine nonfiction, grammar, etc. Her current scholarship (aside from the writing of poetry itself) regards poetic techniques in early American advertising and the narrative of hope in modern literature and film. She has forthcoming poems in The Oxford American, The New Pantagruel, Poetry Southeast, and Christianity and Literature.
Phone: 318.869.5256
Email:
http://personal.centenary.edu/~jstrange
Kim VanHoosier-Carey
Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Academic Resource Center for Students
PhD, University of Texas, 1997
MA, University of Texas, 1992
BA, Emory University, 1989
Specialty: Women's literature
Kim VanHoosier-Carey teaches courses in women's literature and first-year experience. Her other interests include 19th and 20th century British literature, gender and narrative theory, and cultural studies. She is an advisor for the Gender Studies minor at Centenary. In addition, as director of the Academic Resource Center, she works with students on study habits, time management, and other strategies designed to improve academic performance.
Phone: 318.869.5253
Email:
http://www.centenary.edu/arcs/