American Studies, with a grant from the Fund for Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, welcomes Dr. Joy Kasson (professor, American Studies and English, UNC-CH) to campus on Monday, Sept. 15, for what is sure to be an enlightening and entertaining hour that will traverse visual culture and literary criticism and take in subjects as varied as Grandma Moses, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, and The Wizard of Oz.
Her presentation, “A Yearning for Home: American Rural Communities in Mid-Twentieth Century Art and Literature,” begins at 6 p.m. in Yeager and will be preceded by a reception in the Isabella Cannon Room from 4:30 to 5:45 – students and faculty welcome.
Kasson is a professor of American Studies and English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has taught since 1971. She is chair of the American Studies Department; her teaching focuses on the intersection of history, literature, and visual culture. Her books include Artistic Voyagers: Europe and the American Imagination in the Works of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Allston, and Cole (Greenwood, 1982), Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (Yale University Press, 1990), and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (Hill & Wang, 2000).
She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She also serves on the Board of Governors of UNC Press (Chair), the Board of Directors for the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke (Vice Chair), and the Advisory Board of the Institute for Outdoor Drama. She has worked with secondary schools from Alabama to Washington State, and has participated in education partnerships with the National Humanities Center and the North Carolina School of Science and Math.