Vernon / CV 1
ZACKARY VERNON MERRIMACK COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH [email protected] (978) 837-5000 EXT. 3582
CURRENT POSITION Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Film, Merrimack College, 2014-2015
EDUCATION Ph.D. in English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014 M.A. in English, North Carolina State University, 2007 B.A. in English, Clemson University, 2004
BOOK PROJECTS Haunted by Waters: The Hydropolitics of American Literature and Film, 1960-1980. An extended version of my doctoral dissertation, this book examines significant literary, cinematic, and socio-political productions of the 1960s and 1970s that utilize hydrological metaphors of containment and contagion to explore Cold War anxieties regarding gender, sexuality, (post)humanism, and cultural heterogeneity.
Critical Essays on Ron Rash. Co-edited with Randall Wilhelm. Currently under review. This co-edited volume is the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The collection features the work of many top scholars in Southern and Appalachian Studies, and it provides a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
AREAS OF INTEREST Literature: Contemporary, Southern, and Twentieth-Century American Literatures; Transatlantic Modernism and Postmodernism Cinema: Post-1945 Cinema; Environmental Cinema; Documentary; Southern Cinema Theory: Ecocriticism; (Bio)Regionalism; Queer Theory; Gender Studies; Disability Studies
ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS “‘Being Myriad, One’: Melville and the Ethics of the Ecological Sublime in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” Studies in the Novel 46.1 (Spring 2014): 63-82. “Commemoration versus Commodification: Ron Rash and the Search for an Appalachian Literary Identity.” Appalachian Journal 42.1/2 (Fall 2013/Winter 2014): 104-23. “The Problematic History and Recent Cultural Reappropriation of Southern Agrarianism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.2 (Spring 2014): 337- 52. “The Enfreakment of Southern Memoir in Harry Crews’s A Childhood.” Mississippi Quarterly. Forthcoming article.
Vernon / CV 2
“‘Of Great Gabasidy’: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Making of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Journal of Modern Literature. Co-authored with Jessica Martell. Forthcoming article. “Southern Cinematic Slumming: The Rough South Turn in Post-South Film.” The Bohemian South. Eds. Shawn Bingham and Lindsey A. Freeman. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. Forthcoming book chapter. “Reading the Forms of History: Plantation Ledgers and Modernist Experimentation in William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’” Fifty Years after Faulkner. Co-authored with Patrick Horn and Jessica Martell. Ed. Jay Watson. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Forthcoming book chapter.
CREATIVE NON-FICTION ARTICLES “Halloween’s Herald of Democracy: Allan Gurganus and the Horror Show of American Politics.” North Carolina Literary Review 23 (2014): 140-149. “Walking Down Furrows, Talking Down Lines: The Polemics and Poetics of Wilmer Mills.” The Carolina Quarterly 61.1 (2011): 34-43. “The Role of Witness: Ron Rash’s Peculiarly Historical Consciousness.” The South Carolina Review 42.2 (2010): 19-24.
INTERVIEWS AND BOOK REVIEWS “Overcoming the Southern Cult of Authenticity: A Review of Wiley Cash’s This Dark Road to Mercy.” North Carolina Literary Review 24 (2014): 98-100. “Writing the Other World War: Terry Roberts and Ron Rash Discuss World War I, the German Internment Camp in North Carolina, and the Historical Novel.” North Carolina Literary Review 23 (2014): 30-47. “‘Green Life Running Wild’: Environmental Philosophy in Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods.” North Carolina Literary Review 22 (2013): 92-95. “A Poet’s Native Tongue: Ron Rash’s Waking.” The Carolina Quarterly 62.1 (2012): 112-115. “Interview with Wilmer Mills.” CQ Online. July 2011. cqonline.web.unc.edu/webedition/.
ARTICLES UNDER REVIEW “Toward a Post-Appalachian Sense of Place.” “Hydrological Containment and Postwar Cultures of Sexual Repression in John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ and James Dickey’s Deliverance.” “The Global TVA: Transnational Responses to the Damming of the American South.” “Strange Agrarianisms: Transmutations of I’ll Take My Stand in James Dickey’s Deliverance and Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden.” Written for Critical Essays on Ron Rash. “Raising the Dead: An Introduction to Ron Rash.” Co-authored with Randall Wilhelm for Critical Essays on Ron Rash.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE Professor for ENG 3735: Hollywood’s America: Gender, Race and Class in American Cinema, Merrimack College, 2014-2015 Professor for ENG 2770: Literature and Film: American Dreams, American Nightmares, Merrimack, 2014-2015 Professor for FYW 1050: First-Year Writing, Merrimack, 2014-2015 Vernon / CV 3
Instructor for ENGL 143: The Southern Cinema, UNC, Fall 2012, Fall 2013 Teaching Assistant for Todd Taylor, ENGL 142: Film Analysis, UNC, Fall 2011 Instructor for ENGL 128: Ecocriticism and American Literature, UNC, Spring 2011 Instructor for ENGL 124: Contemporary American Literature, UNC, Fall 2010 Graduate Research Consultant for Jennifer Larson, ENGL 143: Race and Cinema, UNC, Spring 2010 Instructor for ENGL 102i: Writing in the Social Sciences, UNC, Spring and Fall 2010 Teaching Assistant for Gregory Flaxman, ENGL 142: Film Analysis, UNC, Fall 2009 Instructor for ENGL 100, 101, 102, and 105: Writing in the Disciplines, UNC, 2007-2014 Instructor for ENG 101: Interdisciplinary Academic Writing, North Carolina State University, 2005- 2007
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Advisory Committee, Interdisciplinary Film Studies Minor, Merrimack College, 2014-2015 Executive Planning Committee, Conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, 2014-2016 Executive Council, Emerging Scholars Organization, Society for the Study of Southern Literature, 2014-2016 Writing Tutor for Duke University’s Writing Studio, Thompson Writing Program, 2010- 2014 Thompson Writing Program Assessment Committee, Duke University, 2013 Research and Editorial Assistant, Society for the Study of Southern Literature, SSSL Newsletter, 2012-Present Peer Review Reader, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 2013 Peer Review Reader, Southern Cultures, 2013 Senior Undergraduate Honors Thesis Committee Member, UNC, 2013 Coordinating Committee Member, Triangle University Food Studies’ Shared Tables: A Triangle Symposium on Local and Global Food Studies, Duke University and UNC, 2011-2012 Director of English Instructors for UNC’s Summer Bridge Program, 2010-2014 Staff Fiction Reader, Carolina Quarterly, 2009-2011 Writer and Researcher for UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South and the Southern Governors’ Association, Traveling Museum Exhibit entitled “This Southern Century: Transforming with Tradition,” 2008-2009 Commissioner, Historic District Commission (Certified Local Government), Architectural Review Board, Hillsborough, NC, 2008-2011 Staff Writer, Coastal Observer (Newspaper), 2005 Chief Art Editor, Semantics (Literary Magazine), 2004 Staff Fiction Reader, Semantics, 2001-2003
AWARDS Pushcart Prize Nomination for “Halloween’s Herald of Democracy: Allan Gurganus and the Horror Show of American Politics,” 2015 Travel and Research Grant, UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, 2014 Senior Teaching Fellowship, UNC, 2013-2014 McLauren Dissertation Fellowship, UNC, 2013 Vernon / CV 4
Travel and Research Grant, UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, 2012 Travel and Research Grant, UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, 2011 Teaching Fellowship, UNC, 2007-2014 Teaching Fellowship, NC State, 2005-2007
CONFERENCES “Transatlantic Appalachia: World War I and the ‘German Invasion’ of the Mountain South,” American Literature Association, May 21-24, 2015. Panel Organizer and Chair, “James Dickey’s Environmental Imagination,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 7, 2014. “James Dickey’s Apocalyptic Agrarianism,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 7, 2014. “Halloween’s Harold of Democracy: Allan Gurganus and the Horror Show of American Politics,” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, George Mason University, March 28, 2012. “The Global TVA: Eco-Cultural Responses to the Damming of the South,” Global American South Conference, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, February 21, 2014. Panel Organizer and Chair, “Radical Environmentalism and Ecoterrorism in Post-1945 American Literature,” Modern Language Association, January 5, 2013. “Between Anarchy and Activism: Ecoterrorist Philosophy in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Modern Language Association, January 5, 2013. “A Yearning for the Mud: Exile and Metafiction in Robert Penn Warren’s Flood,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 11, 2012. “‘I read it right this time’: Faulkner’s Reading Strategy for Literary Modernism,” Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference, University of Mississippi, July 11, 2012. “Erotic Masculinized Nature in James Dickey’s Deliverance,” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Vanderbilt University, March 29-31, 2012. “Contained Waters and the Malaise of Affluence in John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ and James Dickey’s Deliverance,” Post45, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, April 29, 2011. “The Social Utilities of Ecocriticism and Agrarianism,” Northeastern Modern Language Association, Rutgers, April 8, 2011. “Racial Empathy in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” 50th Anniversary Celebration of To Kill A Mockingbird, UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, November 11, 2010. “‘Special considerations under the Lord’: Freaks, the Grotesque and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue in Harry Crews’ Non-Fiction,” Southern American Studies Association, George Mason University, February 13, 2009. “‘A Place for the Lost’: Ron Rash and the Cultural Identity of Southern Appalachia,” Southern Writer’s Symposium, Methodist College, February 23, 2007. “‘Swallow this whole valley’: Ron Rash’s Flood Imagery and the Deterioration of Southern Culture,” Southern American Studies Association, University of Mississippi, February 16, 2007.
ACADEMIC REFERENCES Fred Hobson, Dissertation Director Professor of English, University of North Carolina 218 Greenlaw Hall CB #3520, UNC-Chapel Hill Vernon / CV 5
Chapel Hill, NC 27599 [email protected]
Florence Dore, Dissertation Committee Member Associate Professor of English, University of North Carolina 430 Greenlaw Hall CB #3520, UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599 [email protected]
Michael Grimwood, Dissertation Committee Member Professor of English, North Carolina State University 250 Tompkins Hall Campus Box 8105 Raleigh, NC 27695-8105 [email protected]
Minrose Gwin, Dissertation Committee Member Professor of English, University of North Carolina 444 Greenlaw Hall CB #3520, UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599 [email protected]
Randall Kenan, Dissertation Committee Member Professor of Creative Writing, University of North Carolina 313 Greenlaw Hall CB #3520, UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599 [email protected]
Margaret Bauer, Editor of North Carolina Literary Review Professor of English, East Carolina University Bate 2132-A Greenville, NC 27858-4353 [email protected]