Adam Gussow

Associate Professor of English and Southern Studies

[Curriculum Vita]

Office: Bondurant C213
Telephone: 662-915-7333
Email: agussow@olemiss.edu

• Ph.D., English Literature, Princeton University (2000)
• M.A., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (1983)
• B.A., English and American Literature, Princeton University (1979, magna cum laude)

• African-American Literature
• Southern Literature
• Blues & Jazz literary and cultural studies
• American Road narratives

• Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives From Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (University Press of Tennessee, 2007).

• Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book of the literary scholarship or criticism in southern literature published in the calendar year, awarded by the Society of Southern Literature.

• Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (Pantheon, 1998; Vintage 2000; new edition on University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2009). Winner of the Keeping the Blues Alive Award in Literature, awarded by the Blues Foundation in Memphis.

SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

• “Playing Chicken With the Train:  Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West,” on submission to Duke University Press in a collection entitled Hidden In the Mix:  African American Country Music Traditions, ed. Diane Pecknold.

• “Blues Literature.”  New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, “Literature” volume.  M. Thomas Inge, ed.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008:  44-51.    

• “Plaintive Reiterations and Meaningless Strains:  Faulkner’s Blues Understandings,” in Faulkner’s Inheritance:  Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2005, ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (University Press of Mississippi, 2007):  53-81.

• “Where Is The Love?  Racial Wounds, Racial Healing, and Blues Communities,” Southern Cultures 12.4 (Winter 2006):  33-54.  Reprinted in Southern Cultures:  The Fifteenth Anniversary Reader, 1993-2008 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008)

• “‘If Bessie Smith Had Killed Some White People’: Racial Legacies, the Blues Revival, and the Black Arts Movement,” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Crawford (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2006):  227-252.

• “A Symposium:  New Souths” (Review/essay of Turning South Again:  Re-Thinking Modernism / Re-reading Booker T. and Critical Memory:  Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America, by Houston A. Baker, Jr.), Mississippi Quarterly 15.4 (Fall 2002):  580-594.

• “‘Make My Getaway’: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W.C. Handy's Father of the Blues.” African American Review 35.1 (Spring 2001): 5-28.  Winner of the Darwin T. Turner Award, best article published in AAR during the calendar year.

SELECTED RECORDINGS

• Satan and Adam, Living on the River (Rounder Records, 1996)

• Satan and Adam, Mother Mojo (Flying Fish Records, 1993)

• Satan and Adam, Harlem Blues (Flying Fish Records, 1991).  Nominated for a W. C. Handy Award, “Traditional Blues Album of the Year.”