Professor of English Gary Richards
Gary Richards, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, presented the paper “Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams” at the latest conference of the Eudora Welty Society, “The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty Reconsidered,” held at the College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C. February 21-24, 2019. The conference also featured a staged reading of “Moon Lake,” adapted from the Welty short story of the same title and directed by Brenda Currin. Fourteen Welty scholars made up the cast, including Richards as the narrator.
Earlier in the month, he was a member of a panel discussion of contributors to the collection of essays Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Mae Miller Claxton and Julia Eichelberger, held at the Eudora Welty House and Gardens in Jackson, Mississipi, on February 7. His essay in the collection is “Queering Welty’s Male Bodies in the Undergraduate Classroom.”