The fiftieth anniversary Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will be held in person, with a remote option for international scholars prohibited from traveling to the U.S., from July 21 to July 25, 2024. The Division of Outreach and Continuing Education will contact all remote registrants with an electronic newsletter containing digital links to all events on the conference program below. Remote registrants should be sure to upgrade to the most current version of Zoom software by July 21.
The conference will begin on Sunday, July 21, with a reception at the University Museum, after which the academic program of the conference will open with keynote addresses, followed by a buffet supper on the grounds of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak.
Over the next four days, a busy schedule of lectures and panels will also make room for teaching sessions, an afternoon cocktail reception, a picnic served at Rowan Oak, guided tours, and a closing party on Thursday afternoon, July 25. Throughout the conference, the University’s J. D. Williams Library will display Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia. The University Press of Mississippi will exhibit Faulkner books and titles of related interest published by university presses throughout the United States, and Faulkner collector Seth Berner will give a brown bag lunch presentation on “Collecting Faulkner.”
All registrants, whether they are teachers or not, are welcome at these sessions.
Keynote Speakers
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman is associate professor of American studies and English at Brown University. She is author of Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture (2024) and Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (2012), as well as guest editor of the Faulkner Journal special issue on race, racism, and the work of antiracism (2023) and coeditor of the forthcoming African American Literature in Transition: The 1950s. Her essays on Faulkner have appeared in the Faulkner and Whiteness (2011) and New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (2015) collections, as well as in the Faulkner Journal.
Catherine Gunther Kodat is professor of English at Marist College, where she also serves as provost and dean of the faculty. She is the author of Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture (2015) and Faulknerista (2022), and her essays on Faulkner have been published in American Literary History, the Faulkner Journal, and edited collections including The New Faulkner Studies, Faulkner in the Media Ecology, William Faulkner in Context, Faulkner’s Sexualities, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, A Companion to William Faulkner, Faulkner in America, and Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. She has served as representative-at-large (2018–21) and secretary/treasurer (2003–2006) to the William Faulkner Society.
Trudier Harris is University Distinguished Research Professor of English emerita at the University Alabama and the J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English emerita at the University of North Carolina. A 2018 recipient of the Richard Beale Davis Award for lifetime achievement in southern literary studies, she is author of twelve published or forthcoming books, including Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014), The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009), and The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (1996).
Among her many coedited volumes are Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1997) and the Norton anthology of The Literature of the American South (1998).
Claude Romano is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He is the author or editor of nearly two dozen books, including Le Chant de la vie: Phénoménologie de Faulkner [The Song of Life: Phenomenology of Faulkner] (2005), and his essays on Faulkner have been published in Esprit and Cycnos: Études anglophones. A former holder of the Perelman Chair at the Free University of Brussels (2021–22) and the Gadamer Chair at Boston College (2019–20), he has also held visiting professorships in Italy, Chile, Portugal, Lebanon, Australia, and the US. In 2020 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Philosophy from the French Academy.
Koichi Suwabe is associate professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo. His publications include William Faulkner’s Poetics: 1930–1936 (2008), which received the Shimizu Hiroshi award from the Japanese Association for American Studies, along with monographs on the American novel, noir fiction, Raymond Chandler, and Kurt Vonnegut, and edited collections including Faulkner and Japanese Literature (2019) and An Introduction to American Literature, now in its second edition (2023). He is also the translator for recent Japanese editions of Flags in the Dust (2021) and Light in August (2016).
Additional speakers and panelists will be selected from the call for papers competition.
For the full conference schedule click here.
