Dr. Anne Goodwyn Jones, an expert in women writers of the American South, has been named the fourth Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Missouri-Rolla. She will begin her tenure in UMR’s English department in January 2004.

Jones has taught in the English department at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Fla., since 1984. Prior to that, she held teaching positions at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has lectured widely and held visiting professorships at Chiba University in Japan and The Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta. Most recently she was a resident fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville, Va.

Jones is the author the Jules F. Landry Prize-winning book Tomorrow is Another Day: the Woman Writer in the South, and co-editor of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. She has published numerous essays, journal articles, chapters and reviews, and has three additional books scheduled for publication after 2004 Theory and the Good Old Boys: Manhood and Writing in the Southern Renaissance, Faulkner’s Masculinities: Manly Writing in the ‘Kotex Age,’ and Faulkner’s Daughters: Women Writers of the Southern Renaissance. Jones plans to complete work on these projects while she is at UMR.

While at UMR, Jones will also teach an English course, "Southern Women Writers," from 6-9 p.m. Wednesdays during the winter 2004 semester, which begins Jan. 12. Her fields of expertise include William Faulkner, Southern writers, feminist theory and women writers.

Jones earned a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977 and a bachelor of arts degree from Hollins College in 1967. During 1962-1963, Jones passed A-level examinations in history, English and French at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology in Cambridge, England. She is currently president of the Faulkner Society and is a member of the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association and the Southern Historical Association.

During her years at Hollins College, Jones rafted down the Mississippi River with a group of other students. Her adventure is the basis for Southern writer Lee Smith’s latest novel, The Last Girls.

UMR’s Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professorship in Humanities, established by an estate gift to the university in 1999, is rotated annually or biennially among academic departments in the UMR College of Arts and Sciences. Jones will be working and teaching as a member of the English department at UMR.

Weiner was a graduate of UMR. He also studied at the University of Hawaii and at Washington University in St. Louis. He was retired from Westinghouse Electric Corp.

Previous Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professors were Dr. Caroline Whitbeck, who served in the philosophy department in 2003, Dr. Charles Alexander, who served in the history department in 2002, and Dr. Gilberto Perez, who served in the English department from 2000 to 2001.