About the Contributors
Rent from DeepDyve- About the Contributors
William R. Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and Adjunct Professor of Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has made numerous documentary films and has authored over 100 publications in the fields of folklore, history, literature, and photography. His book of interviews of Delta blues greats, Give My Poor Heart Ease, was published by UNC Press in 2009.
Guest editor Bryan Giemza is a North Carolina native, reformed lawyer, and devoted writer who teaches literature at Randolph-Macon College. He is coauthor with Donald Beagle of Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan (University of Tennessee Press) and an editor of Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary (Louisiana State University Press). He has just finished Lost Colonies: Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South, a book-length project that spans some two hundred years of literary history.
David T. Gleeson is Reader in History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He is a former director of the Carolina Lowcountry Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston. He currently is completing a manuscript on the Irish and the Confederate States of America to be published by UNC Press.
Geraldine Higgins is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Irish Studies Program at Emory University. Her research and teaching focus on Irish literature and culture from Yeats to the present. She is the author of Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats and a critical study of playwright Brian Friel.
Conor O'Callaghan was born in Newry, Northern Ireland, and grew up thirteen miles away in Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland. He has published three collections of poetry and a comic prose memoir, Red Mist, which was made into an hour-long documentary on Setanta TV.
Christopher J. Smith is Chair of Musicology at Texas Tech University. His research areas include American and other vernacular musics, improvisation, and performance practice. He tours internationally with medieval music ensemble Altramar and the Irish band Johnny Faa, and his latest book project examines Afro-Celtic musical exchange before the American Civil War. [End Page 113]
