FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 6, 2006

MUW’s Southern Women’s Institute welcomes first visiting scholar

By Jill D. O’Bryant

COLUMBUS, Miss. -- Mississippi University for Women will welcome its first visiting scholar at its Southern Women’s Institute for the spring 2006 semester.

Dr. Anne Goodwyn Jones of Gainesville, Fla., will teach an upper level seminar called “Rewriting the South: Contemporary Southern Women Writers.”

She will lead the class in looking at films and reading stories, novels and poems that demonstrate the wide range of cultures and experiences to be found today among women in the South.

The class also will read work from Native American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, African-American, Scots-Irish, Anglo and Creole cultures and will read work that ranges from the working class to the upper class while examining the continuity of southern women’s traditions, the effects of change and how they write about men, family and sexuality.

In addition to the class, Dr. Jones plans to do some writing, give talks and organize a panel of scholars for Women’s History Month.

“I’m really excited that we are getting a scholar of her caliber,” said Dr. Bridget S. Pieschel, director of the Southern Women’s Institute.

Dr. Jones earned a bachelor’s degree from Hollins College and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also did a year’s study at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology in Cambridge, U.K.

She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill; Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn.; The Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta; Chiba University in Japan; University of Florida in Gainesville; and University of Missouri in Rolla.

Jones was a visiting professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi this fall, and she has served one year as a visiting professor at University of Missouri, Rolla, and one year as a resident fellow at Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville.

“I’ve spent my career studying southern women writers and southern women’s history,” she said. “Nothing could make me happier than to be teaching and talking about these subjects as part of the first institute I know of dedicated specifically to southern women and to be working at MUW with its commitment to the education of women.

“My undergraduate years were spent at Hollins in Virginia, and although I griped about the lack of men at the time, now I recognize the range and depth of the benefits that come with an education and a women’s college. As a university for women that now admits men, MUW seems to offer it all.”

Co-editor and author of two books, she currently has four books in progress: “William Faulkner: Southern Masculinities in the ‘Kotex Age,’” “Theory and the Good Old Boys: Manhood and Writing in the Southern Renaissance,” “Faulkner’s Daughters: Women Writers of the Southern Renaissance” and “The Lamar Memorial Lectures for 2007.”

The Southern Women’s Institute, which is housed in Orr Chapel on the MUW campus, serves as a multi-disciplinary center for the study of southern women in both traditional and non-traditional roles.

The goals of the Institute are to serve as a gathering place for learning and research, to promote research on women in areas of leadership, health, art and business and to become a repository for southern women’s and MUW’s history.

For more information about the Southern Women’s Institute, please call (662) 241-6125.