ERIC E. SOLOMON

ABOUT ERIC E. SOLOMON

 

I am a graduate of Emory University, where I received my PhD in English (August 2017). My dissertation, Southernmost Currents: Liminal Narratives of Love in the Florida Straits, reads the lives and works of four writers, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Reinaldo Arenas, and John Hersey, in intimate relationship to the island of Key West in the latter half of the twentieth century. Across four chapters in which I read fictional and dramatic narrative as well as personal ephemera, my biocritical portraits explore the ways in which each writer experienced and imagined queer love and loss in/ from the archipelago of the Florida Keys. Positioned in conversation with the New Southern Studies, queer theory, and emergent digital humanities, Southernmost Currents both locates the Keys within a broader terraqueous zone of confluence and seeks to zoom out and refocus the map of “southern” queer studies for our current moment. (See slideshow with overview and maps).

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I am currently working on two book projects! Stay tuned!

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Previously, I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Mississippi and Universidad de Belgrano (Buenos Aires, Argentina). My honors thesis, Shattering Colored Glass: the Trauma of Magic Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved and José Saramago's Blindness [Ensaio sobre a cegueira], reads the genre of magical realism as a literary mode that both reflects and performs trauma.

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I am originally from Leland, Mississippi, birthplace of Kermit the Frog. I grew up a few miles off the legendary Blues Highway 61, running through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, what historian James Cobb calls “the most southern place on earth.” Like Kermit, my professional and creative work aims to soothe the Blues and make it easier for us all to be “green.”

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