Holly Springs native Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883) left her Mississippi Home in 1873 to pursue a literary career in the Northeast. She became “Sherwood Bonner,” a writer whose witty stories shed light on the dynamics of region, race, and gender in both the reconstruction South and post-Civil War America. Bonner enjoyed brief notoriety during her own time, but the recent republication of her work has drawn serious critical attention to it and the picture it offers of the writer’s relationship to her time and place.
Speakers Expertise:
Dr. Kathryn McKee is Center Director and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is co-editor, with Deborah Barker, of
American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, and her articles have appeared in various journals, including
American Literature,
Legacy,
Southern Literary Journal, and
Mississippi Quarterly. She has a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. McKee’s areas of scholarly research include nineteenth-century American literature, the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century U.S. South, writing by women, global south studies, film studies, and humor studies.
