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Sharon Monteith

Professor of American Studies and Director of Research for the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies. She works across literature, history, film, media and cultural studies, usually in interdisciplinary studies of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Southern Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2000) which maps a feminist taxonomy of female friendship and of whiteness studies. It explores relationships between black and white women as represented by a wide range of authors and with particular focus on Ellen Douglas, Kaye Gibbons, Carol Dawson, Lane von Herzen. It examines how white women writers grappled with interracial relationships in literature and popular culture prior to the interest in and controversy around Kathryn Stockett's The Help. In her book American Culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Monteith argues that it is impossible to understand the Sixties without recourse to the southern freedom struggle. She published (with Paul Grainge and Mark Jancovich) Film Histories (EUP/Toronto, 2006). She was awarded a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship to work on Race and Gender in the Mississippi Delta in 2001-2 and most recently co-edited The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media (2011) with Allison Graham and The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South (June 2013) .

Together with Prof. Nahem Yousaf (Nottingham Trent University), she edits the Manchester University Press series of monographs Contemporary American and Canadian Writers.

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/aseries.asp?id=56

Please email proposals for new books in the series to both editors.

Monteith also publishes on British fiction and culture. She was the first person to write a book about award-winning novelist Pat Barker whose writing she has followed since 1982. She has interviewed Pat Barker on a number of occasions including publicly at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival and the Durham Book Festival and has spoken about her work on BBC radio and presented on Barker in the US, Scandinavia and Britain. She published Pat Barker (2002). She co-edited Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker (2005) and Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interview (2005).

Monteith has supervised 25 PhD students to completion on a variety of topics including Southern literature, the civil rights movement, political cinema, the American 1960s, new social movements, US intellectual and cultural history, contemporary British fiction, African American dance on screen, icons including Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali, writers including William Faulkner and Pat Barker, and issues such as gender, race and, region . With Helen Foster she published "Writing a Research Proposal, Securing an Offer and Applying for Funding" The Research Student's Companion (London: Sage, 2008). She is a member of the AHRC's Research Careers and Training Advisory Network as well as its Peer Review College.

Prof. Monteith welcomes applications from students who wish to follow PhD study on the US South, literature and intellectual ideas of region, culture and identity, especially in a transnational or global framework; the Civil Rights Movement, particularly SNCC, the Movement in film, fiction and in cultural memory; civil rights fiction; issues of race and representation in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States; . She would welcome applications from students of contemporary American or British fiction and students wishing to work on World War I in literature and cultural memory, the fiction of Pat Barker.

Expertise Summary

Monteith also co-edited Gender and the Civil Rights Movement with Peter Ling (Garland, 1999/ Rutgers, 2004) and South To a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, with Suzanne Jones (LSU, 2002) and has contributed to a number of collections on Southern culture including Media, Culture and the Modern African Freedom Struggle (2002), Emmett Till in Historical and Literary Imagination (2008), Poverty and Progress in the US South (2007), the Blackwell Companion to Southern Culture (2007). Her essay about the ways in which exploitation movies of the 1960s dramatize Freedom Summer was published in Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee's American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (University of Georgia Press, 2011). With Allison Graham she edited the Media and Film volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2011). She edited the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South (2013) which includes her essay on "Civil Rights Fiction" and she completing a book for the University of Georgia Press called SNCC's Stories: Narrative Culture and the Southern Freedom Struggle of the 1960s.

Research Summary

Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies. She researches the US South in cultural history, film, media and contemporary fiction. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood: Interracial… read more

Selected Publications

  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. American culture in the 1960s Edinburgh University Press.
  • MONTEITH, S., 2011. Exploitation movies and the freedom struggle of the 1960s. In: BARKER, D.E. and MCKEE, K., eds., American cinema and the southern imaginary University of Georgia Press.
  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. The murder of Emmett Till in the melodramatic imagination: William Bradford Huie and Vin Packer in the 1950s. In: POLLACK, H. and METRESS, C., eds., Emmett Till in literary memory and imagination Louisiana State University Press. 31-52
  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. Sally Hemings in visual culture: a radical act of the imagination? Slavery & Abolition. 29(2), 233-246

Current Research

Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies. She researches the US South in cultural history, film, media and contemporary fiction. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood: Interracial Friendships in Southern Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2000), American Culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), which argues that it is impossible to understand the Sixties without recourse to the southern freedom struggle, and (with Paul Grainge and Mark Jancovich) Film Histories (EUP/Toronto, 2006). She has been working on a long-term research project on the Civil Rights South in the Melodramatic Imagination since she was awarded a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship to work on Race and Gender in the Mississippi Delta in 2001-2. This includes a series of articles and a collective biography of SNCC focusing on memoirs, fiction and film about the Student Non-Violent Cordinating Committee. Monteith has also co-edited Gender and the Civil Rights Movement with Peter Ling (Garland, 1999/ Rutgers, 2004) and South To a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, with Suzanne Jones (LSU, 2002) and has contributed to a number of collections on Southern culture including Media, Culture and the Modern African Freedom Struggle (2002), Emmett Till in Historical and Literary Imagination (2008), Poverty and Progress in the US South (2007) and the Blackwell Companion to Southern Culture (2007). Her essay about the ways in which exploitation movies of the 1960s dramatize Freedom Summer is published in Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee's American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (2011). With Allison Graham she recently edited the Media and Film volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (forthcoming 2011). She is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South.

Monteith publishes on contemporary British fiction. She was the first person to write a book a book about Pat Barker and is currently working on a literary and intellectual biography of the award-winning writer whose writing she has followed since 1982. She has interviewed Pat Barker on a number of occasions including at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. She published Pat Barker (2002), following it with a co-edited collection Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker (2005) and Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interview (2005) which she wrote with Jenny Newman and Pat Wheeler. More recently she delivered the plenary at the first UK conference devoted solely to Pat Barker's work that was organised by Pat Wheeler and she is contributing the Afterword to Wheeler's edited collection Re-Reading Pat Barker (forthcoming with Cambridge Scholars Press).

Past Research

Sharon Monteith researches and teaches Southern Studies (literature, film, media and cultural studies) and contemporary American Studies in a variety of contexts including US race relations and civil rights, visual culture and cultural memory, new social movements, intellectual history, and the 1960s. She is the Associate Dean of the Gradaute School with responsibility for the Arts Faculty and has supervised some 17 PhD students to completion on a variety of topics including Southern literature, political cinema, figures such as Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali,and issues such as gender and race, region and enviromentalism . With Helen Foster she published "Writing a Research Proposal, Securing an Offer and Applying for Funding" The Research Student's Companion, eds. Ged Hall and Jo Longman (London: Sage, 2008)

Together with Prof. Nahem Yousaf (Nottingham Trent University), she edits the Manchester University Press series of monographs Contemporary American and Canadian Writers. Please email proposals for new books in the series to both editors.

Prof. Monteith welcomes applications from students who wish to follow M.Res or PhD study on the US South and ideas of region, culture and identity, especially in a transnational or global framework; on issues of race and representation in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States; on southern literature, the Civil Rights Movement, particularly the Movement or the 1960s as represented in film, fiction and in cultural memory; and on the American 1960s in intellectual history. She is interested in the decade's relationship to different cultural forms. She also writes on contemporary fiction in a number of contexts related to class and memory. For example, she has published a book of interviews with contemporary British and Irish writers as well as two books on the Prize-winning British writer Pat Barker. She would welcome applications from students of contemporary American or British fiction and of literatures in comparative context

  • 2015. Civil Rights Cinema. In: The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature Cambridge University Press. (In Press.)
  • 2014. SNCC’s Stories: Narrative Culture and the Southern Freedom Struggle of the 1960s University of Georgia Press. (In Press.)
  • 2013. The Bridge from Mississippi’s Freedom Summer to Canada: Pearl Cleage’s Bourbon at the Border”. In: Cultural Circulation:: CanadianWriters and Authors from the American South—A Dialogue Austrian Academy of Arts and Science. (In Press.)
  • SHARON MONTEITH, ed., 2013. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South Cambridge University Press. (In Press.)
  • 2013. Civil Rights Fiction. In: The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South Ist. Cambridge University Press. 159-173 (In Press.)
  • SHARON MONTEITH, BRITTA WALDESCHMIDT NELSON and CLARA JUNCKER, eds., 2013. The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade Verlag Berlin. (In Press.)
  • 2013. A Tale of Three Bridges: Pont Saint-Michel, Paris 1961,. In: SHARON MONTEITH, BRITTA WALDESCHMIDT NELSON and CLARA JUNCKER, eds., The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade Verlag Berlin. (In Press.)
  • MONTEITH SHARON, 2012. “SNCC’s Stories at the Barricades”. In: PHILIP DAVIES AND IWAN MORGAN, ed., From Sit-Ins to SNCC: Student Civil Rights Protest in the 1960s University of Florida Press. 97-115
  • ALLISON GRAHAM AND SHARON MONTEITH (GEN. ED CHARLES REAGAN WILSON), ed., 2011. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media 1st. University of North Carolina Press.
  • MONTEITH, S., 2011. Exploitation movies and the freedom struggle of the 1960s. In: BARKER, D.E. and MCKEE, K., eds., American cinema and the southern imaginary University of Georgia Press.
  • , 2011. Foreword. In: Re-Reading Pat Barker Cambridge Scholars. vii-x
  • MONTEITH SHARON, 2009. Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. In: DAVID SEED, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century US Fiction Blackwell.
  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. American culture in the 1960s Edinburgh University Press.
  • MONTEITH SHARON AND HELEN FOSTER, 2008. Writing a Research Proposal, Securing an Offer and Applying for Funding. In: GERARD HALL AND JO LONGMAN, ed., The Postgraduate’s Companion Sage.
  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. Sally Hemings in visual culture: a radical act of the imagination? Slavery & Abolition. 29(2), 233-246
  • MONTEITH, S., 2008. The murder of Emmett Till in the melodramatic imagination: William Bradford Huie and Vin Packer in the 1950s. In: POLLACK, H. and METRESS, C., eds., Emmett Till in literary memory and imagination Louisiana State University Press. 31-52
  • MONTEITH, S., 2007. How Bigger Mutated: Richard Wright, Boris Vian and “The bloody paths through which we push logic into dread”. In: GRAY, R. and ZACHARASIEWICZ, W., eds., Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe and Europe in the US South Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. 149-166
  • SHARON MONTEITH, 2007. Southern Like US: The Globalizing trend in Southern Studies The Global South. 1(1), 66-74
  • GRAINGE P, JANCOVICH M AND MONTEITH S, 2007. Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader Edinburgh University Press/Toronto University Press.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2006. The Never-ending cycle of poverty: Sarah E. Wright’s <i>This Child’s Gonna Live</i>. In: JONES, S.W. and NEWMAN, M., eds., Poverty and progress in the US South since 1920 Amsterdam: VU University Press. 83-97
  • S. MONTEITH and , 2006. Pat Barker. In: , and DAVID KASTAN, eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature Oxford University Press.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., JOLLY, M., YOUSAF, N. and PAUL, R., eds., 2005. Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
  • MONTEITH, S.J. AND N. YOUSAF, 2005. Double Vision: Regenerative or Traumatized Pastoral. In: , ed., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 283-300
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2005. Screening The Man Who Wasnt There: The Second World War and 1950s Cinema. In: , ed., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 115-127
  • YOUSAF, N. AND S. J. MONTEITH, 2005. Reading Pat Barker. In: MONTEITH, S., JOLLY, M., YOUSAF, N. and PAUL, R., eds., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. i-xxiii
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2004. Pat Barker. In: MONTEITH, S.J., NEWMAN, J. and WHEELER, P., eds., Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interviews London: Hodder Arnold.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2004. Recent and Contemporary Women Writers in the South. In: GRAY, R.J., ed., The Blackwell Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 536-551
  • YOUSAF, N. AND MONTEITH, S.J., 2004. Making an Impression: New Immigrant Fiction in the Post-War South”, Modern Languages Forum. 60(2 Rethinking the US South), 214-224
  • YOUSAF, N. AND MONTEITH, S.J., 2004. Hanif Kureishi. In: MONTEITH, S.J., NEWMAN, J. and WHEELER, P., eds., Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interviews London: Hodder Arnold.
  • MONTEITH, S.J. AND NEWMAN, J., 2004. Bernard Mac Laverty. In: MONTEITH, S.J., NEWMAN, J. and WHEELER, P., eds., Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interviews London: Hodder Arnold.
  • YOUSAF N AND S MONTEITH, 2004. “I was Pearl and my last name was Harbor”: Overwriting the South in Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s “Kelly North Carolina Literary Review: Ethnic North Carolina. 113-122
  • LING P J AND SJ MONTEITH, ed., 2004. Gender and the Civil Rights Movement New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2003. The Movie-Made Movement: Civil Rites of Passage. In: Memory and Popular Film Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. 120-143
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2002. Pat Barker Tavistock: Northcote House.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2002. South to New Places. In: South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, New York. 1-19
  • JONES, S.W. and MONTEITH, S.J., eds., 2002. South to a new place: region, literature, culture Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2001. "The 1960s echo on": Images of Martin Luther King as deployed by white writers of contemporary fiction. In: Media, Culture and the Modern African Freedom Struggle University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 255-272
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 2000. Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
  • LING, P.J. and MONTEITH, S.J., eds., 1999. Gender in the Civil Rights Movement New York: Garland Publishing.
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 1999. Revisiting the 1960s in Contemporary Fiction:. In: Gender in the Civil Rights Movement Garland Publishing, New York and London. 215-38
  • MONTEITH, S.J., 1999. Between Girls: Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster and Friendship as a Monological Formulation Journal of American Studies. 33(1), 45-64
  • MONTEITH, S., 1999. America's Domestic Aliens: African Americans and the Issue of Citizenship in the Jefferson/Hemings Story in Fiction and Film. In: Alien Identities: Explaining Difference in Film and Fiction Pluto Press, London. 31-48
  • The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade Verlag Munich. (In Press.)
  • "Who was William Faulkner to them?": Racial Liberals and Civil Rights Workers in the Civil Rights Era. In: Fifty Years After Faulkner University Press of Mississippi. (In Press.)

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