Welcome to Mallory's Substack

"Writings on Readings" and "Writings on Culture"

Welcome to my Substack!

I am a retired professor of English and French who, after 43 years of teaching, has become used to having a small but often willing and at times enthusiastic audience. I’m hoping to find something like that for some of the writing I’ve done and plan to do. I’ll divide my posts into two sections, one for less formal writings, mostly thoughts about current culture and events, that I’ve titled “Writings on Culture.”

The other section, “Writings on Readings,” will be devoted to somewhat more serious literary writing. The focus of much of my writing, whether for an academic or a general audience, has been a response to my reading. (In some cases, that “reading” has been of movies.) In this section, I plan to post some new pieces and some old ones, some previously published and others not.

For a little more context: I got a BA in French from UT Austin and a PhD in Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo. I taught for 4 years at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD as a civilian professor (with no personal connection to the Navy) and then returned to my home state of Texas where I taught at Tarleton State University in Stephenville until my retirement. My main teaching areas, in addition to freshman composition, were western world literature, British literature, women in literature and popular culture, and French language and literature. (Many faculty members at Tarleton wear many hats, sometimes all at once.) Much of my writing and publishing has been in the area of “chick culture.” Here is some information on books I co-edited in that field:

Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, co-edited with Suzanne Ferriss, Routledge, 2006.

Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, co-edited with Suzanne Ferriss, Routledge, 2008.

Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, co-edited with Julie A. Chappell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

My “formal” title is Regents Professor Emeritus which I’m sure will, along with 5 or 6 dollars, get me a gourmet coffee at almost any upscale coffee shop.

I’ll be posting about once a month. If you subscribe (subscription is free), you’ll get a notice when something new goes up. If you don’t, it will be here anyway should you decide to give it a try. Thank you for reading!