In Memoriam: Susan Hawkins (1946–2016)

We mourn the loss of Susan Hawkins, respected member of the Cormac McCarthy Society and participant in many Society-sponsored conferences and activities. Professor Hawkins earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Portland State University and in 1981 received her PhD from the University of Oregon with a dissertation, “The Poetics of the Postmodern American Prose Poem.” She was a poet herself, and her love of the power of language guided her reading, research, and teaching interests. She held teaching positions at the University of Kansas and Lewis and Clark University before settling for most of her career at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. There she taught modern and contemporary fiction and poetry to undergraduates and Master’s candidates and served as English Department Chair in her last five years before retiring in 2012.

Professor Hawkins won various awards and grants, among which was a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bulgaria, but she was proudest of receiving the Oakland University Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. The university’s most distinguished teaching award, it is given to one faculty member per year chosen from across the university’s disciplines.

Those who attend conferences and panels on Cormac McCarthy will remember Susan’s work on Cold War themes, American imperialism, and end-times in McCarthy’s later works. Her “Cold War Cowboys and the Culture of Nostalgia” (Cormac McCarthy International Conference, University of Reims, France, 2002), was selected for inclusion in Christine Chollier’s Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories. Other presentations include “Renegotiating the Border(s): Cormac McCarthy’s Revisionist Western Romance” (Great Lakes American Studies Association Annual Conference, 1997); “‘Tryin to Minimize the Pain’: The End of Things in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain” (Cormac McCarthy Annual Conference, Austin, 2000); “Out of the Preterite World: Crossing into the Cold War” (American Literature Association, Boston, 2005); and “Historical Endings, Vestigial Times: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” (American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction, San Diego, 2006). In the final years of her career, Professor Hawkins undertook an extended research project entitled “Chronicles of the Late World: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” and she delivered a series of related papers from this project at the American Literature Association in Boston, 2007; the Cormac McCarthy Society International Conference in Warwick, England, 2009; and the American Literature Association Fiction Symposium, Savannah, 2011.

Society members will miss Professor Hawkins’ wit and humor, her feistiness, her capacity for friendship, and her support for the work of her colleagues and students.

Fig. 1.

Susan Hawkins.

Photo credit: Jay Margulies