School of Arts & Letters
The Noonkester School of Arts and Letters at William Carey University prepares students for an enriched life through study and performance in a host of humanities and arts disciplines.
Enriching Life Through Study
The Noonkester School contains the Departments of History and Social Science, Language and Literature, and Theatre and Communication. These diverse departments have a common mission, to enhance student, faculty, and public understanding of the humanities and the arts. Featured are human expressions of reading, writing, thinking, criticizing, designing, visualizing, acting, publishing, and public speaking.
Inspiring Grace in Every Study
Join us to develop aptitudes and interests suitable for many callings and careers: law, teaching at the secondary, college or university level, politics, ministry, journalism, theatre, design, public service, corporate employment, educational and cultural tourism, museum work, and others. Our faculty members are diverse in background and highly qualified with credentials from research universities and study in settings ranging from London, England and Seville, Spain to Serampore, India.
Our programs specialize in interdisciplinary work, small classes, international and domestic travel for field experience programs, and an emphasis on the exchange of ideas in a collegial atmosphere. Students in the Noonkester School enjoy opportunities that include travel, internships, study abroad, undergraduate research projects, master’s study, and a range of honor societies and campus publications.
The concerns of the Noonkester School reflect the broad and intensive interests of our namesake William Carey. There are even opportunities for hands-on work with the acclaimed Carey Center, one of the world’s leading museum repositories for original materials and artifacts related to Eighteenth Century Britain and Nineteenth Century India. You can join many others in discovering your intellectual and expressive capacities in the Noonkester School of Arts and Letters.
Meet the Dean
Dr. Myron Noonkester
Dr. Myron Noonkester is the dean of the Noonkester School of Arts and Letters. The School is named for his parents Ralph and Naomi Noonkester. Dr. Ralph Noonkester served as president of William Carey College from 1956 to 1989, and Naomi Noonkester was the registrar in the early 1950s.
Dr. Noonkester has served as a professor instructor and administrator at William Carey University since 1983. His teaching ranges from early modern British history to the history of Mississippi.
His scholarly interests include sheriffs in the Atlantic world and Edward Gibbon, historian of Roman decline. His favorite publications are his research notes regarding English literary figures, including novelists Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope and playwright John Marston.
Dr. Noonkester is a founding co-director of Center for the Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, which is housed in Donnell Hall on the Hattiesburg campus and on the university website.
Degrees and Certifications:
- Ph.D., British History | University of Chicago
- Bachelor of Arts, History | Duke University, Angier B. Duke Scholar
Hattiesburg
WCU Box #146 | 710 William Carey Parkway | Hattiesburg, MS 39401
artsandletters@wmcarey.edu | (601) 318 - 6592