Martyn Richard Bone

Martyn Bone, associate professor of American literature

My main research areas are the literature and culture of the U.S. South, African American literature, and transnational American studies. I teach a range of courses in American literature, African American literature, U.S. southern literature, American studies, and U.S. popular music.

I am the author of Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (University of Georgia Press, 2018: Where the New World Is) and The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State University Press, 2005: Postsouthern).

My third monograph, The Writings of Jesmyn Ward: Matters of Black Southern Life and Death, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in spring 2025: The Writings of Jesmyn Ward. This book project was supported by a 2022-23 Carlsberg Foundation monograph fellowship: Carlsberg monograph fellowship. You can read more about the project here: Literature offers a different kind of witnessing to environmental catastrophe. 

I am the editor of Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) and coeditor of the University Press of Florida mini-series Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (2013); The American South in the Atlantic World (2013); and Creating and Consuming the American South (2015). 

I have contributed to numerous books including Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge University Press, 2021), The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South (Oxford University Press, 2016), the New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). My articles have appeared in American Literature, Journal of American Studies, CR: New Centennial Review, African American Review, and other journals.

I was previously associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi and lecturer in American studies at the University of Nottingham. I have been a visiting professor/scholar at Mississippi, the University of Sydney (twice), and the University of Manchester.

I am a member of the department's research forum in environmental humanities, which I will chair from spring 2025. At the end of 2022, I was elected to the faculty PhD committee, which I have chaired since August 2023. I am on research leave for the fall 2024 semester.