PETRY, Alice Hall 1951-

PERSONAL: Born July 8, 1951, in Hartford, CT; daughter of James B. and Elizabeth K. Hall; married John E. Farley, 1997. Education: University of Connecticut, B.S. (with highest honors), 1973; Connecticut College, M.A., 1976; Brown University, Ph.D. (with distinction), 1979. Politics: Independent. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431.

CAREER: Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, instructor, 1979-80, assistant professor, 1980-86, associate professor of English, 1986-95; Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, professor and chair of English department, 1995-2001. Visiting professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, spring, 1987. Consultant to Center for Contemporary Media, Los Angeles, CA, USIA lecturer in Japan, 1991.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1982; Fulbright scholar at Universidade Federal do Parana (Brazil), 1985; senior postdoctoral fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, 1987-88.

WRITINGS:

A Genius in His Way: The Art of Cable's "Old Creole Days," Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Teaneck, NJ), 1988.

Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories, 1920-1935, UMI Research Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1989.

Understanding Anne Tyler, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1990.

Critical Essays on Anne Tyler, Macmillan (New York, NY)/G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1992.

Critical Essays on Kate Chopin, Macmillan (New York, NY)/G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1996.

Contributor of more than forty-nine articles and more than one hundred reviews to literature, humanities, and southern studies journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Alice Hall Petry told CA: "My interest in southern literature came about due to one of those serendipitous situations that make scholarly activity so endlessly intriguing. In graduate school I was preparing a term paper on the New England local colorists when it occurred to me that it might be interesting to investigate other aspects of regional writing as well. So for the sake of a balanced paper I decided to look at a handful of southern writers—and discovered, to my Yankee horror, that this body of literature was far more powerful, technically innovative, and poignant than anything I had encountered from New England. From that moment, my career was effectively redirected, with the bulk of my research thereafter focusing on southern literature."