Harriet Pollack

Affiliate Professor of American Literature

Professor Pollack primarily writes about the body in southern literature and photography in the contexts of southern history and cultural trauma. She is the author of Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman (University of Georgia Press, 2016), and the editor of eight additional volumes, including these two: Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race; New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race; and with Christopher Metress, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, a book about the racial murder that began the civil rights movement. Recently her work on the body has extended into mystery and crime fiction as she co-edited Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight (2023). Her ongoing Welty research interests include the writer’s unpublished manuscripts and the long-sealed but newly released Welty family papers. Additionally, in 2019, Prof. Pollack inaugurated a book series with University Press of Mississippi –Critical Perspectives On Eudora Welty– and is now its ongoing editor. The series publishes both edited collections and monographs exploring new issues in Welty studies.   

• Pollack has twice served as the Welty Society President (most recently 2018-2020).                
• She has planned three Welty conferences: “The Continuous Thread of Revelation”: Eudora Welty Reconsidered, an international Welty Society conference held at the College of Charleston, 2019 (and co-directed with Prof. Julia Eichelberger);the "Eudora Welty International Centennial Celebration Academic Conference, Welty at 100," 2009, (Jackson, MS); and "Home Ties, an International Welty Conference," (Jackson, MS) 1996 (codirected with Prof. Suzanne Marrs). 
• She has twice been elected to the board of the Society for The Study of Southern Literature (SSSL)She taught in the NEH program Eudora Welty's Secret Sharer:The Outside World and the Writer's Imagination, 2008. 
• She served as external examiner for the Swarthmore College Honors Program 2018-2022; as book review editor for Southern Literary Journal 2008-2016; and as external reader for many presses and journals including Oxford University Press, PMLA, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Literary Journal, and the Eudora Welty Review.  

Honors and Awards 

• In 2023 the Eudora Welty Review awarded Pollack a research grant for work on the correspondence and relationship between Eudora Welty and her mother, Chestina Andrews Welty. 
• In 2008 Pollack received the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding scholarship, "given on occasion to an individual whose contributions to Welty studies have been exceptional." 
• Pollack's essay “Photographic Convention and Story Composition: Eudora Welty’s Use of Detail, Plot, Genre, And Expectation” received the 1998 Kirby Best Essay Prize from the South Central Modern Language Association. 

Publications 

Books: 

Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight (w/ Jacob Agner. UPM, 2023). 

New Essays on Eudora Welty, Race, and Class, (UPM, 2019). 

Eudora Welty's Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman (UGAP, 2016).  

Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race (UGAP, 2013). 

Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (w/ Christopher Metress, LSU, 2007).  

Eudora Welty and Politics; Did the Writer Crusade (w/ Suzanne Marrs, LSU, 2001). 

Having Our Way: Women Rewriting The Tradition in Twentieth-Century America (1995).  

Select Articles: 

"Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward, and Natasha Trethewey: Writers of Our Mississippi Moment Showing How to Read Those We Had Read Before" in Faulkner, Welty, and Wright: A Mississippi Confluence. (forthcoming UPM). Eds. Jay Watson and Annette Trefzer 

"When a Mystery Leads to Murder: Genre Bending, Homme Fatals, Thickening Mystery, and the Covert Investigation of Whiteness in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles," Welty and Mystery. UPM. 2023 

“Evolving Secrets: The Patterns of Eudora Welty’s Mysteries,” Detecting The South in Fiction, Film, and Television. Eds. Deborah Barker and Theresa Stuckey. LSUP, 2019 

“How She Wrote and How We Read: Teaching The Pleasure and Play of Welty's Modernist Techniques,” Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: 21st-Century Approaches, Eds. J Eichelberger & Miller, University Press Mississippi. 

“On Welty's Use of Allusion" in Eudora Welty, ed. Harold Bloom. (Orig, in  Southern Quarterly. Also reprinted in The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly ––“the very best essays from 50 years of scholarship and thought,” and in The Critical Response To Eudora Welty, ed. Laurie Champion.) 

'You make a joke like that and you jes part of the problem' — Grotesque Laughter, Unburied Bodies, and History: Shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle," Mississippi Quarterly. 

"Reading John Robinson (and Eudora Welty)" in a special issue on Welty And Sexuality, Mississippi Quarterly. 

"Photographic Convention And Story Composition: Eudora Welty's Use of Detail, Plot, Genre, And Expectation From "A Worn Path" Through Bride of The Innisfallen," South Central Review. 

"From Shiloh to In Country to Feather Crowns: Bobbie Ann Mason, Women's History and Southern Fiction" in Southern Literary Journal. 

"Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience" in Eudora Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert Devlin, U Press Mississippi. Originally published in Mississippi Quarterly.