Ty Hawkins

Ty Hawkins is Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a scholar of American literature and culture who 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. He 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. This project 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."