CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo., Dec. 7, 2007 -- Dr. Christopher Rieger, assistant professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University, has been appointed assistant director of the school’s Center for Faulkner Studies.

The announcement was made by Dr. Carol Scates, chair of the Department of English.

“Dr. Rieger will work with Dr. Robert Hamblin, the founding director of the Faulkner Center, to broaden and strengthen the work of the Center,” Scates said.

Southeast’s Center for Faulkner Studies was established in 1989, following the University’s acquisition of the Louis Daniel Brodsky collection of Faulkner materials.

Rieger joined the Southeast faculty this fall, after teaching the previous four years at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.  He grew up in South Carolina and holds a bachelor’s degree from Emory University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Louisiana State University.

His doctoral dissertation, a study of four Southern writers—William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Erskine Caldwell, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—won the 2002 Lewis P. Simpson dissertation award, given annually for the best dissertation in the English department at Louisiana State University.

The dissertation will be published next year as Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature by the University of Alabama Press.

Rieger has published essays and presented conference papers on James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Mitchell and Larry Brown, as well as the focal authors of his book.  In his criticism, Rieger frequently examines the handling of ecological and environmental issues in literary texts.

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