Daniel Cross Turner
Assistant Professor, Twentieth-Century American Literature
Adviser, Southern Studies Minor

Ph.D. Vanderbilt University
M.A. University of South Carolina
B.A. Hampden-Sydney College

Dr. Turner's primary teaching and research fields are modern and contemporary U.S. literature, with an emphasis on the literature and culture of the American South, poetics, and film. His published scholarship focuses on questions of regional definition in relation to national and transnational contexts, modes of cultural memory, and connections between cultural and aesthetic media, especially in their potential to record historical pressures and transitions.

Dr. Turner is the author of SOUTHERN CROSSINGS: POETRY, MEMORY, AND THE TRANSCULTURAL SOUTH (University of Tennessee Press, 2012):
http://utpress.org/bookdetail-2/?jobno=T01585
SOUTHERN CROSSINGS demonstrates the centrality of poetry written in and about the South to conceptions of “Southernness” and “Americanness.” Offering innovative perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing poets, the book illustrates poetry’s value as a genre well suited to investigating the ways in which historical conditions are culturally assimilated and reproduced. SOUTHERN CROSSINGS contributes to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the South and its place in the larger world.

Dr. Turner has also published numerous articles on contemporary writers and filmmakers, which appear in edited collections as well as journals, including MOSAIC, GENRE, SOUTHERN QUARTERLY, MISSISSIPPI QUARTERLY, and SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL, among other venues.

He is currently co-editing the collection, UNDEAD SOUTHS: BEYOND THE GOTHIC, for Louisiana State University Press. UNDEAD SOUTHS interprets literature, films, and other media that explore death and deathways as well as figures returned from the grave (e.g., ghosts, vampires, zombies).

His other current book-length project, SOUTHERN/PRIMITIVE, engages with conjunctions and conflicts between modernity and primitivism (aesthetic, philosophical, ethnographic, ecological) in the literature, cinema, and other cultural artifacts of the U.S. South from 1920 to the present.

He is Co-Editor of the Southern literature listserv on H-Net (H-Southern-Lit).

In addition to genre courses (poetry/poetics, film studies, and cultural studies), he has designed topics courses, including “ADAPTATIONS” (literature in connection with new media and multi-modal forms); "ANIMALS" (animal studies); "CULTURAL FORMS OF NOSTALGIA" (memory studies); "COMEDY" (genre studies); "POETRY AND THE SEA" (poetics); and "AFTERLIVES" (ghostlore).

Dr. Turner has also taught classes in AMERICAN LITERATURE, from surveys to period courses on THE JAZZ AGE, THE COLD WAR, and CONTEMPORARY U.S. LITERATURE.

He has devised courses in SOUTHERN STUDIES, including surveys of Southern literature, seminars on "THE CINEMATIC SOUTH," courses on POPULAR CULTURE AND THE SOUTH, a graduate independent study on “SOUTHERN ACCENTS” (literary, filmic, and aural/musical reproductions of Southern dialects) as well as an interdisciplinary travel course, “BLUE RIDGE TO BLUE SEA” on diverse literary, historical, and sociolinguistic subcultures from the western North Carolina mountains to the South Carolina coastal plain.

Dr. Turner is the Adviser for Coastal's new interdisciplinary minor in Southern Studies. Please visit the Department of English's website for information about the Southern Studies minor.