The William Faulkner Society

Headshot portrait of Frédérique Spill, president of the William Faulkner Society.

Frédérique Spill

President

Frédérique Spill is professor of American literature at the University of Picardy–Jules Verne in Amiens, France, where she is also head of the research group UR UPJV 4295 CORPUS. She is the author of Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap (2024). She contributed to Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (Salem Press, 2014) and to Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She coedited The Wagon Moves: New Essays on As I Lay Dying, published in 2018 (L’Harmattan), as well as the spring 2018 issue of The Faulkner Journal. She’s part of the editorial boards of The Faulkner Journal and of The French Journal for American Studies (RFEA). She has also published articles in French and in English on varied contemporary American authors including Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Willa Cather, Russell Banks, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Spencer, William Gay, Jesmyn Ward and Ron Rash. The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash’s Writing was published by South Carolina Press in 2019. In 2021 she coedited a special issue of The Journal of the Short Stories in English devoted to Ron Rash’s short fiction. She currently works on a book project on Jesmyn Ward and on a monograph on Faulkner’s early work. She currently serves as President of the William Faulkner Society.

Headshot portrait of Rebecca Nisetich, vice president of the William Faulkner Society.

Rebecca Nisetich

Vice President

Rebecca Nisetich is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Honors Program at the University of Southern Maine (USM). Her scholarship is based in Race and Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory, and her published work concerns representations of identity in American literature, law, and culture. Her articles have appeared in African American Review, the Faulkner Journal, Studies in American Naturalism, two essay collections on William Faulkner, and an anthology on Kate Chopin. Her current work explores representations of racial indeterminacy in 20th century American literature, and interpellations of legal discourse in twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature and popular culture. She currently serves as vice president of the William Faulkner Society, and co-editor of the Faulkner Journal. She is currently at work on a book project that puts Animal Studies and Critical Race Theory into conversation. Building on the work of transdisciplinary scholars adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Donna Haraway, and others, the project expands the concept of rights beyond the anthropocene.

Headshot portrait of Laura Wilson, treasurer of the William Faulkner Society.

Laura Wilson

Treasurer

Laura Wilson received her PhD in English from the University of Mississippi, with a dissertation entitled On Southern Soil: The Art and Ecology of Racial Uplift, 1895-1950 which she is now turning into her first monograph. Her newest project Redefining Narratives of the Plantation: From Kindred to the Edge of Here explores how contemporary Black authors, from 1970 to today, challenge dominant representations of the plantation. Laura was a 2020-2022 Council on Library Information and Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in African American Studies at Fisk University. Having moved back home to England from the States in 2022, she currently works at the British Library in London. Laura has published on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston, and is the co-editor of a collected volume entitled The Living Legacy of African American Studies: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future(s), under contract at UGA Press. She is the treasurer of the William Faulkner and Eudora Welty societies respectively, and sits on the Media and Tech Committee for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

Headshot portrait of Anthony Gottlich, secretary of the William Faulkner Society.

Anthony Gottlich

Secretary

Anthony Gottlich is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. His dissertation “Weed and Body Entanglements: Plantation Resonances in Contemporary Multiethnic American Literature” positions modern agriculture as a permutation of the plantation regime. He explores weeds as reading practice to investigate fictional representations of racial, ecological, and economic entanglements. He traces resonances between Brown and Black counter-epistemologies that imagine futures independent of the plantation. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Global South, MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly and ASAP/J, and the edited collection The Living Legacy of African American Studies (UGA Press). Anthony currently serves as Secretary for the William Faulkner Society and was formerly an Executive Council member of the Emerging Scholars Organization within the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

An illustrated portrait of Joanna Davis-McElligat, representative-at-large of the William Faulkner Society.

Joanna Davis-McElligat

Representative-at-Large

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas, and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies. Her first monograph, entitled Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora, is under contract with The Ohio State University Press in the New Suns: Race, Gender, and the Speculative Series. She is the co-editor of four volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), bell hooks’ Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her work can be found in south: a scholarly journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The New William Faulkner Studies (2022), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (2021), The Routledge Companion to the Literature of the U.S. South (2022), and Through Mama’s Eyes: Unique Perspectives on Southern Matriarchy (2021), among many other places. Her areas of teaching and research include Africana Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Literary Theory, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comics Studies, Southern Studies, and 20th and 21st century U.S. Literary Studies. She is currently serving as the Immediate Past President of the Comics Studies Society.

A photograph of Solveig Dunkel, representative-at-large of the William Faulkner Society.

Solveig Dunkel

Representative-at-large

Solveig Dunkel is Associate Professor at the University of Lille (France), where she teaches American literature with a focus on environmental humanities. She is a holder of the agrégation of English language, a French competitive state examination. She received her PhD in American Literature in November 2022. Her thesis, which was co-supervised by the University of Picardy-Jules Verne (UPJV) and Boston University, is entitled “‘The Old Meat After All’: William Faulkner’s Poetics of the Body,” and was awarded with the Dissertation Award in Social Sciences of the UPJV. Her work has been published in the Faulkner Journal, The Mississippi Quarterly, Transatlantica and The European Journal of American Culture. She is the book review editor for the Faulkner Journal, and a representative-at-large at the William Faulkner Society.