Professor Richard Gray FBA

Richard Gray has been Professor and Distinguished Visiting Professor at several universities in the UK and USA, including Essex, Georgia and South Carolina. A former editor of the Journal of American Studies, he has published more than 20 books and over 50 articles on American literature. His books include The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award), The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, A History of American Literature (first and second editions), A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, and After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11. He has received many awards for his work and co-organised conferences that include an international colloquium on the American South, held in Vienna and funded by the Austrian and British Academies (the proceedings were published as Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe-Europe in the American South). He is a regular speaker at international conferences, a reviewer for various newspapers and journals and a regular broadcaster for the BBC. His most recent book is A History of American Poetry. In 2016 he was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Professorship. He is currently completing a project titled Speaking the Unspeakable: American Writers and the Writing of Trauma.