Our Faculty

ADAM GUSSOW
Associate Professor of English and Southern Studies

Office hours:

Bondurant C213
662-915-7333
agussow@olemiss.edu

Education
PhD English Literature, Princeton University (2000)
MA English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University (1983)
BA English and American Literature, Princeton University (1979, magna cum laude)

Teaching and Research Interests

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


Selected Publications

  • 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. Honorable mention, John G. Cawelti Book award for outstanding scholarly inquiry into American culture, sponsored by the American Culture Association.
  • Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York (University of Tennessee Press, 2007)
  • "Plaintive Reiterations and Meaningless Strains: Faulkner's Blues Understandings, " Faulkner's Inheritance: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2005, ed. Donald Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi) (forthcoming)
  • Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (Pantheon, 1998; Vintage 2000).
  • "Delta Demagogues, Primitive' Music, and the Blues Entrepreneur: W.C. Handy's Mississippi Problem, " Southern Cultures 8.3 (Fall 2002): 56-57
  • "'Shoot Myself a Cop': Mamie Smith's 'Crazy Blues' as Social Text." Callaloo 25.1 (Spring 2002): 8-44.
  • "'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)
  • Review of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, by Lorenzo Thomas, American Literature 74.1 (March 2002): 177-179.