From the ‘Back of Beyond’ to the Middle of Forever: The Urgency of Transnational Regionalist Perspectives in Anthropocene Time

June Howard is Full Professor Emerita in the Departments of English and American Culture and holds a courtesy title in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book was the widely read and still-cited Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985). The 1996 essay collection on Sarah Orne Jewett that she edited and contributed to, New Essays on Country of the Pointed Firs, was both controversial and influential. Howard’s 2001 Publishing the Family is a microhistory that takes the serial publication in Harper’s Bazaar of a collaborative novel by twelve authors, including Henry James and Mary Wilkins Freeman, as a window into the year 1908 and the “public/private” binary as constitutive of modernity. Her most recent book is on regionalism as a literary movement and cultural force, in the United States and beyond; it is titled The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, and was published by Oxford University Press in December 2018. Howard holds an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship in recognition of her contributions to undergraduate education. She received the University of Michigan’s Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 2004 and held leadership positions, including serving as Associate Dean at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and chairing the Department of American Culture. She was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, in 2013.