Road Scholars Speakers Bureau

Mary Ellis Gibson, Ph.D.             

Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Greensboro, author, editor

Greensboro, NC

H: (336) 707-3248

Travel region: Statewide

About Mary Ellis Gibson:

Mary Ellis Gibson is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she teaches English literature, women's and gender studies, and colonial and post-colonial literatures. She has edited two collections of stories by southern women writers: New Stories by Southern Women and Homeplaces, both from University of South Carolina Press.  She is working on a book about southern cooking from a global perspective, that mingles memoir with social history.  Next year, Ohio University Press will publish her book on English language poetry in India, and an accompanying anthology.  Having grown up in Boone, with parents from the Piedmont and 'down East," Gibson says she grew up being 'not from here.' She brings to her talks on southern literature and culture her interest in the ways 'not from here' become home.

Southern Writing as Historical Preservation? Reflections on Landscape, Tourism, and Culture

How do southern writers help us reflect on the way we see and understand our surroundings? Tremendous changes in the southern landscape in recent years have created new surroundings that shape our daily lives. It is sometimes difficult to see what surrounds us, and we may or may not want to remember how things once were. Through fiction, essays, and poems, Dr. Mary Ellis Gibson examines what is preserved, lost, and worth seeing in the contemporary South.

Program requirements: lectern, microphone

Still Cookin’: Food and Memory in Southern Literature

Some people say southern culture will not disappear until southern food is unrecognizable as distinct from that of other regions. Others say southern cooking will not disappear until we quit talking about it. From Mary Randolph’s 1824 Virginia Housewife to the twentieth century, southerners have written, argued, and reminisced about food. Dr. Mary Ellis Gibson traces the history of southern foodtalk in cookbooks and in fiction, asking why southerners are so obsessed with eating together and why they find it even more important to remember and talk about the meals they have shared.