Eric Smith

My plan upon enrolling in graduate studies at MSU was ultimately to pursue a doctoral degree and to obtain a tenure-track job as an English professor, and I have been very fortunate to achieve these goals. The instruction and encouragement that I received at MSU from faculty members like my first true scholarly mentor and dear friend, the late Richard F. Patteson, Rich Lyons, and Kelly Marsh ideally prepared me to take these next steps.

MSU degree(s):

M.A. in English, 2000

Other degrees:

B.A. in English, 1997, Athens State University

Ph.D. in English, 2004, University of Florida

Current Position:

Professor of English

Organization:

University of Alabama in Huntsville

I came to MSU after a year of teaching high school in Alabama when I received the Howell H. Gwin Scholarship and the Eugene Butler Award along with a teaching assistantship—for which I am eternally grateful. My plan upon enrolling in graduate studies at MSU was ultimately to pursue a doctoral degree and to obtain a tenure-track job as an English professor, and I have been very fortunate to achieve these goals. The instruction and encouragement that I received at MSU from faculty members like my first true scholarly mentor and dear friend, the late Richard F. Patteson, Rich Lyons, and Kelly Marsh ideally prepared me to take these next steps. After MSU, I was awarded a fellowship at the University of Florida, where I studied under the eminent James Joyce scholar Brandon Kershner. I was also influenced at UF by Phillip E. Wegner, my second true mentor and now dear friend. My first scholarly publications, however, came from the work that I did as a student at MSU and were the direct result of Dr. Patteson’s encouragement and professional guidance. Those early publishing successes gave me confidence, taught me about the practicalities of academic publishing, and continued opening doors for me years after the fact. Today, I have authored approximately 30 academic articles and essays. In 2012, I published my first scholarly monograph, Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan). My second monograph, Postcolonial Naturalism: Periodization, World-Literature, and the Anglophone Novel was published in 2023 by Liverpool University Press. I am also editor of the two-volume collection of essays by Darko Suvin Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in SF and Utopianism (Peter Lang, 2021) and the collection Phantasms of the Red Republic: The Cultural Afterlives of the Paris Commune, now under contract with Brill (and long delayed). I am currently writing a book on film tentatively titled Figuring the Contemporary in Popular Cinema: Genre, History, Event. In 2024, I received the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Association of College English Teachers of Alabama. I am grateful to the MSU English Department for granting me the support necessary to pursue my dreams of graduate education and for inspiring, challenging, and guiding me to that end.