Ty Hawkins

Ty Hawkins is Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma State University. As an academic administrator, he serves as the college's senior academic leader for curriculum development, assessment and accreditation, and enrollment management across 23 departments and schools, as well as five interdisciplinary programs. The college is large and diverse, producing nearly 300,000 student credit hours each year; it enrolls greater than 6,000 majors and employs more than 600 faculty and staff. Since arriving at OSU, Hawkins has led reforms that are generating more than $2 million in annual instructional and programmatic savings, while producing more than $1 million in annual new revenues. He also leads a $1.8 million OSRHE STEM Workforce Initiative to address STEM pipeline issues and the state’s critical workforce needs.

As a scholar, Hawkins's work in American literature and culture focuses mainly on narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. His research interrogates relationships between literary forms and their logics, and questions of gender, justice, national identity, and violence. Hawkins is the author of three monographs: Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror (2012), Cormac McCarthy's Philosophy (2017), and Just War Theory and Literary Studies: An Invitation to Dialogue (2021, co-authored with Andrew Kim). Hawkins's current book project, The New Southern Noir: Surprising Alternatives to Revanchism and Ressentiment, turns his attention to Southern Studies and crime fictions. Under advance contract with Louisiana State University Press' Southern Literary Studies Series, The New Southern Noir centers readings of canonical crime writers--Raymond Chandler, James Dickey, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Portis, and Robert Stone among them--alongside readings of contemporary writers such as John Brandon, Gillian Flynn, Donald Ray Pollock, Jesmyn Ward, and Daniel Woodrell.  A selection from the study revised into a stand-alone, peer-reviewed article appeared in a 2023 issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory as "Vietnam Vet Noir: Quarry, Dog Soldiers, and the Anti-Ethical Appeal of a Contemporary Subgenre." A second selection from the study, also revised into a stand-alone, peer-reviewed article, appeared in a 2024 issue of The Cormac McCarthy Journal as "Cormac McCarthy's 'Truth that Would Silence Poetry a Thousand Years': The Atomic Bomb and the Fate of the West in The Passenger and Stella Maris."