Department of English
Miles Orvell
Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American studies, with a broad interest in modern American culture. Orvell’s first book, a study of Flannery O’Connor, was reprinted as Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction (University Press of Mississippi, 1991), and he has written essays more recently on Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Theodore Dreiser. Signaling his interest in literature in relation to broader cultural issues, Orvell published The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (University of North Carolina Press), which dealt with literature, photography, and material culture, and was co-winner in 1990 of the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.
One of Orvell’s main areas of interest is visual culture and its relationship to literature, and in 1995 he published his essays in After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (Mississippi, 1995). More recently, he has edited a collection of FSA photographer John Vachon’s work (John Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II, 2003); and he has written a history of photography in the United States for the Oxford History of Art Series (American Photography, 2003).
In the last five years, Orvell has focused his research on the cultural meaning of place, and he has co-edited a collection of essays, Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (Rodopi, 2009). He is completing an interdisciplinary study called, Main Street in the American Mind: Community, Memory, and the Construction of Place, which recovers the complex and contradictory cultural meanings of the small town at the same time that it problematizes the icon of Main Street.
His essays and reviews on literature, photography, documentary film, technology and the arts, have appeared in American Art, History of Photography, Film Quarterly, American Literary History, Prospects, Tikkun, Winterthur Portfolio and many other journals.
Orvell has presented papers and lectured widely at conferences and universities in the U.S. and Europe and was a Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Denmark (1988). He has directed several N.E.H. Summer Seminars for School Teachers' on Documentary Expression in the Thirties and on Ethnic Autobiography. In addition, he serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the University of North Carolina Press series Cultural Studies of the United States; on the advisory board of Revue Française d’ Etudes Americaines, and is an Editor of the series, Architecture/Technology/Culture (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press).
Active in the American Studies Association, Orvell is Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online, published by Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. In 2009, he received the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement, awarded by the American Studies Association, and in 2010 received one of the University’s “Great Teacher” awards.