Leigh Anne Duck
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Cinema
I research and teach courses in US, especially southern, literature and visual culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. I also edit the journal The Global South, a topic I explore in advanced courses.
Biography
Leigh Anne Duck is Associate Professor of English and faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Southern Cultures and the Interdisciplinary Minor in Cinema Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (2006) as well as many essays on literary and visual representations of the U.S. South, exploring particularly the representational logics associated with racial segregation, regional manifestations of neoliberalism, and the transnational circulation of artists, ideologies, and aesthetic styles. These articles appear in venues including Journal of American Studies, American Literary History, Journal of American Folklore, and CR: New Centennial Review, as well as an array of edited collections. Duck served on the editorial board of American Literature from 2017-2019, and she has edited The Global South (published by Indiana University Press) since 2013. Duck’s current book project, Expression, Extraction, and Hollywood South: On Location in Louisiana, focuses films shot and set in the state since 2005, the year financial incentives to lure large film productions from California were greatly expanded—leading to Louisiana becoming one of the nation’s most active production sites in 2013—and also the year of Hurricane Katrina. While works produced through such funding structures are often aptly criticized for neglecting or even disguising the specificities of local spaces, “Hollywood South” expanded production in landscapes widely associated with anxieties concerning contemporary political values, racial injustice, and ecological peril. The resulting films illuminate the innovations and ambivalences of neoliberal cinema, and meanwhile, local filmmakers have been using these incentives to establish careers within the state rather than relocating to historic production centers. These independent documentary and fictional projects reflect local, regional, and transnational identifications and belief systems very different from those that Hollywood has historically associated with this area. Duck’s planned comments for this panel reflect research conducted during her 2021-22 “Scholars and Society” Mellon/ACLS fellowship, which enabled her to work with the New Orleans Video Access Center. NOVAC has provided advocacy and support enabling the city and state’s marginalized communities to produce and distribute expressive media and performances since 1972.
Education
B.A. English, Rice University (1989)
M.A. English, Southern Methodist University (1993)
Ph.D. Language, University of Chicago (2000)