About
Fred Hobson is a retired Professor of English and Lineberger Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at UNC-CH. A native North Carolinian with a PhD from UNC-CH, he taught at the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University before returning to Chapel Hill in 1989. The author of numerous books in American literature and intellectual history (focusing on, among other things, the U.S. South) , he has also contributed to numerous non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and various other U.S. newspapers. He is currently working on a book, under contract with Oxford University Press, to be entitled The Savage South: History of an Image.
Degrees
AB, English, UNC-CH,1965
MA History, Duke Univ, 1967
PdD English, UNC-CH, 1972
Publications
- Mencken: A Life (New York: Random House, 1994). Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.
- Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Winner of the 1983 Jules F. Landry Award in Southern Studies.
- The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (University of Georgia Press, 1991).
- But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Louisiana State University Press, 1999). Winner of the 2005 Jules F. Landry Award in Southern Studies.
- The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
- (Co-ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Awards
- National Endowment for the Humanities – Fellowship for Independent Study, 1976-77.
- Fellow of the National Humanities Center – 1991-92.
- Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC-CH, Spring 1991.
- Bogliasco Fellow in the Humanities, Liguria Study Center, Italy, April-May 2008.