Scott Herring
Associate Professor
Affiliate Faculty in Gender Studies and the American Studies Program
Ph.D. in English, 2004, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.A. in English, 1999, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
B.A. in English, 1998, University of Alabama at Birmingham, summa cum laude
B.A. in History, 1998, University of Alabama at Birmingham, summa cum laude
I specialize in modern American literature and queer American Studies. While I spend the majority of my time on sexual and social modernity, much of my current efforts also hover around urbanism, urbanity, and concepts of social disorder. My first book, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), tracked how modern artists and writers tweaked the standard formulas of "city mysteries" or "slumming" literatures to undermine the genre’s promise of subcultural revelation. My second book, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010), tackles a complementary metropolitan narrative—the rural-to-urban flight to the city. It charts how U.S.-based artists use what I term "rural stylistics" to fashion critiques against lesbian and gay metro norms. The arguments presented in these two books have appeared in a number of articles on queer regionality, metronormativity and visual culture, Willa Cather, Frank O’Hara, and intra-national modernism. I am currently building on arguments in both books to craft a queer theory of material culture entitled "The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern America" for the University of Chicago Press.
Recent Courses
Undergraduate:
L 354 American Literature since 1914: Gender, Sexuality, and American Modernism
L 358 Twentieth Century American Fiction: Modern American Literature and Masculinities
L 371 Critical Practices: Sex Across the Disciplines
L 389 Feminist Literature and Criticism: Introduction to LGBTQ Studies
L 202 Literary Interpretation: Misfits
L 111 Discovering Literature: Town and Country
Graduate:
L 742 Regional Sexualities
L 655 Sex, Gender, and American Modernisms
Selected Publications (click images for more information)
Books:
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: New York University Press, 2010 (Sexual Cultures series).
Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Edited works:
“Regional Modernisms.” Special Issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 1-194.
Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Ralph Werther. Scholarly edition of 1919 text with critical introduction, textual introduction, and textual notes. New Brunswick , NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
“Brokeback Mountain Dossier.” Special section of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1 (2007): 93-109.
Selected Articles:
"Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood." Postmodern Culture 21.2 (2011): Forthcoming.
"Rural." Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. Revised edition. New York: New York University Press, forthcoming.
"Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding." Criticism 53.2 (2011): 159-89.
"Erotic Uncreativity: A Response to Steven F. Kruger." American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 945-50.
"Tille Olsen, Unfinished (Slow Writing from the Seventies)." Studies in American Fiction (2010): 81-99.
"Micro: Region, History, Literature." American Literary History 22.3 (2010): 626-34. (review essay)
“The Hoosier Apex.” Southern Communication Journal 74.3 (2009): 243-51. Special issue on “Queering the South” edited by Charles E. Morris III.
“Southern Backwardness: Metronormativity and Regional Visual Culture.” American Studies 48.2 (2007): 37-48. [published 2008]
“Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-urbanism.” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 341-372. Reprinted in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977. Ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
“Keith Haring and Queer Xerography.” Public Culture 19.2 (2007): 329-348.
“Catherian Friendship; Or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006): 66-91.
“Caravaggio’s Rednecks.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.2 (2006): 217-236. Special issue on “Art Works” edited by Richard Meyer and David Román.
"Spoon River Anthology's Heterosexual Heartland." Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 256-69.
“Willa Cather’s Lost Boy: ‘Paul’s Case’ and Bohemian Tramping.” Arizona Quarterly 60.2 (2004): 87-116.
“Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 414-427.
"Makeovers: Regional Universalism and the Newer South's Public Spheres." The Southern Quarterly 41.1 (2002): 87-105.
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity." African American Review 35.4 (2001): 581-98.
Select Honors and Awards
Lambda Literary Award, LGBT Studies, 2011 (Co-winner)
Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Indiana University, 2008-2009.
Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award, 2008.
Committee for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equity curriculum recognition award, Penn State, 2007.
Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, 2004-2007 (declined).
Modern Language Association Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in LGBTQ Studies. Honorable Mention. Awarded to “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” PMLA, 2002.
University of California, Berkeley Summer Research Institute Fellow, 2000.
