Tom J. Richardson
Chair, Department of Language & Literature
Professor of Language & Literature
trichardson@wmcarey.edu
(601) 318-6593
Thomas J. Richardson is Chair of the Department of Language and Literature and Professor of English at William Carey, where he has taught and worked since 2005. He earlier studied and taught at Vanderbilt University (Ph.D., 1975), the University of Alabama (M.A., 1965), and the University of Southern Mississippi, (B.A., 1962), where he also taught from 1971-2005, including terms as Chair of the Department of English (1983-88) and Coordinator of Senior Honors in the Honors College (1990-2003). He has also taught at Auburn University, Meridian Community College, and Gulfport High School. His academic interests include American literature, especially Mark Twain and his contemporaries, literary history and theory, and southern literature and culture. He has written on a broad range of southern writers, including George W. Cable, Twain, William Styron, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Ann Grau, William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, and Willie Morris, among others, and more general articles on literary history in The History of Southern Literature (1985), The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), the Companion to Southern Literature (2002), and A Literary History of Mississippi (2017), as well as a section on Mississippi writers for Mississippi: Portrait of An American State (Clairmont, 1995, 1998, 2004), a textbook for high school use. In addition to his duties as chair, at Carey he teaches a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and literature, including core courses in addition to advanced courses in literary theory and the required senior seminar. He was Co-Editor of the Mississippi Folklore Register from 1979-1989 and an Advisory Editor of the Southern Quarterly from 1979-2004, and over time he has read papers and/or offered lectures at such different settings as the OLLI Center at USM, the Mississippi Philological Association, the Mississippi Community College Writing Association, the Institute for Faith and Culture at Baylor University, the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the Sue Price Lipsey Lecture at Mississippi College, the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, the South Central Conference on Christianity and Literature at Loyola University, the Mississippi Council of Teachers of English, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the ADE Summer Seminar at Amherst College. He is married to Pamela Myrick Mottley, and he has two children, John (Fairhope, AL), and Ryan (NYC), and two grandchildren, Colin and Cate.