Gary Richards
Gary Richards focuses his scholarly work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. literature and culture, with particular attention given to that of the U.S. South. He specializes in the study of fiction and drama, most typically through the lens of regional and sexuality studies.
His scholarship includes: Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936-1961; essays in a range of collections, including Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-first-Century Approaches, The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, Comics and the U.S. South, Contemporary Literary Criticism on Race in American Comics, Faulkner’s Sexualities, Beth Henley: A Casebook, Critical Insights: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and essays in Journal of American Studies, North Carolina Literary Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and Journal of Homosexuality.
In addition to giving over seventy academic presentations, Richards is a popular lecturer with long associations with the Louisiana Book Festival, the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, and UMW’s Theatre Road Trip.
Richards routinely offers the courses Southern Literature, Modern American Fiction, and Contemporary American Fiction and has taught special topics courses in American humor, post-World War II U.S. drama, and southern short stories. He has also offered senior seminars on William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, the literature of New Orleans, and southern women writers. Within the General Education program at UMW, he offers two first-year seminars, one on sexuality and southern literature and one on Stephen Sondheim; courses focused on writing about the South and writing about musical theater; and Global Issues in Literature. He has also taught courses in summer study abroad programs in Innsbruck, Austria and Dublin, Ireland, with the most recent being Modernism at the Margins: James Joyce and William Faulkner.
B.A., Trinity University (San Antonio); M.A., Ph.D., Vanderbilt University. UMW Directory Profile.