Joseph M. Flora

Arriving in Chapel Hill 1962 following a year of full-time teaching at the University of Michigan, Joseph Flora has spent the majority of his career at UNC.  (Twice he has held visiting appointments at the University of New Mexico.)  He has served as associate dean of the Graduate School and twice served as department chair (1980-91).  During 2008-09 he serves as Acting Director for the Center for the Study of the American South.

Flora has co-edited with Robert Bain several bibliographical and critical studies of Southern literature, and is editor of The English Short Story 1880-1945. He has written books on Vardis Fisher, William Ernest Henley, and Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway’s Nick Adams won the 1982 Mayflower Award.  In 2001 Flora was named Atlanta Professor of Southern Culture. In 2002 he edited, with Lucinda MacKethan, The Companion to Southern Literature. In 2002 he edited Rediscovering Vardis Fisher: Centennial Essays. With Amber Vogel, he edited Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary; it received the 2006 Jules and Frances Landry Award.  His Reading Hemingway’s “Men Without Women” is scheduled for publication in 2008. He is on the editorial boards of Studies in Short Fiction, The Southern Literary Journal, The Thomas Wolfe Review, and The Hemingway Review. He is author of numerous essays about Western and Southern writers and about Hemingway.  He has been president of The Western Literature Association, The Thomas Wolfe Society, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English.  He was recognized as Distinguished Ph.D. Alumnus at 50th anniversary celebration of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, September 1988.