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The Schools of Nursing and Pharmacy operate on both the Oxford and Jackson campuses. The Schools of Dentistry, Health Related Professionals and Medicine, and the Health Sciences Graduate School, are based in Jackson only. (Additional healthcare programs are available through the School of Applied Sciences on the Oxford campus.) Other than these exceptions, the schools above are on the Oxford campus.

Faculty Profile

Judson D Watson

English
Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies and Professor of English
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C211 Bondurant
University, MS 38677
(662) 915-7671
Joined UM: August 15, 1989

Areas of Expertise

  • SOUTHERN CULTURE
  • SOUTHERN LITERATURE
  • WILLIAM FAULKNER

Brief Bio

Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Jay Watson, a native of Athens, Georgia, received his B.A. degree from the University of Georgia (1983) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1985, 1989). He joined the English department in 1989 and was promoted to Professor of English in 2007. During the 2002-2003 academic year he served as Visiting Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. In 2012 he was the winner of the Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Mississippi, and in 2013 he was nominated for the Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. His publications include Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner (U of Georgia P, 1993), Conversations with Larry Brown (UP of Mississippi, 2007), Faulkner and Whiteness (UP of Mississippi, 2011), and Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985 (U of Georgia P, 2012), which received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 C. Hugh Holman Award in southern literary studies. His articles on southern literature and film, law and humanities, and psychoanalytic theory have appeared or will appear in American Quarterly, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, American Imago, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and numerous other journals and essay collections, including American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary and The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945. He was a co- founder and, from 1995 to 2000, co-editor of Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism. From 2009 to 2012 he served as President of the William Faulkner Society, and he is currently Director of the annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference at the University of Mississippi and co-editor of the forthcoming conference volumes, Faulkner's Geographies, Fifty Years After Faulkner, and Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas. He and his wife, Susan, have two children, Katherine and Judson.

Degrees

BA
English
University of Georgia (1983)
MA
English
Harvard University (1985)
PhD
English
Harvard University (1989)

Awards

Faculty Achievement Award
2012
SEC Faculty Achievement Awards Program UM Nominee
2013
College of Liberal Arts - Outstanding Teacher of the Year
2014
University of Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year
2014
The Distinguished Professor Award
2021