Donal Harris
Professor, Director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities
Email OnlyPatterson Hall 449donal.harris@memphis.eduEducation
B.A., California State University, Los Angeles, 2005
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2013
Academic Summary
My research and teaching focus on the social institutions and media technologies that shape our definitions of the arts, particularly twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. literature. My first book, On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (Columbia UP, 2016), explores the relationship between mass-market magazines and modernist literature during the first half of the twentieth century.
Since 2019, I have been the director of the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities, which supports and publicizes interdisciplinary humanities research in the region. From 2022-2025 I was the Joe Orgill Chair of Community Engaged Scholarship.
From 2021 to 2024, I served as P.I. for Citizens of Cossitt: The Legacies and Futures of Public Libraries in the South, a partnership with Memphis Public Library to create a multi-platform history of the city’s first library. Some of that work can be found in the Library History Collection and Everett R. Cook Oral History Collection at Dig Memphis, MPL’s digital collection.
I am currently P.I. on Burial Plots: Historic Cemeteries and Community Storytelling, a team humanities program to preserve and interpret the cultural and environmental history of Memphis cemeteries – both the well-maintained and the nearly forgotten. The project has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies and the UM Division of Research and Innovation.
Select Publications
Books
- On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (Columbia University Press, 2016), in Modernist Latitudes Series
Essays
- "Citizens of Cossitt: Southern Publics, Then and Now," Public Humanities (1), 2025.
- "The Geographies of Poverty: Modernist Photo Texts in the Age of Social Media," Special Issue on "Binary Modernisms," Open Library of Humanities, 8.1, 2022.
- “Literary Magazines,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell. Wiley- Blackwell, 2022. 1-8.
- “Time Inc.” American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi. Cambridge University Press, 2018. 403-420.
- “Getting Real: From Popular Modernism to Peripheral Realism.” After the Program Era. ed. Loren Glass. University of Iowa Press, 2017. 219-232. New American Canon series.
- "States of Literature," The Los Angeles Review of Books (September 2016).
- "The Art of Administration," The Los Angeles Review of Books (February 2016).
- "Understanding Eliot: Mass Media and Literary Modernism in the American Century." Modern Language Quarterly 76.4 (2015): 491-514.
- "Novel Protests: The New Left and Black Fiction in the 1960s." Black Writers and the Left, ed. Kristin Moriah (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).
- "Jonestown as Genre," The Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2013).
- "Finding Work: James Agee in the Office." PMLA 127.4 (2012): 766-781.