Former Warren Center newsletter editor Thomas F. Haddox is the author of Fears and Fascinations: Representing Catholicism in the American South (Fordham University Press, 2005). Haddox, now an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, received his Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. He has also published articles in American Literature, The Flannery O’Connor Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Mosaic, Southern Quarterly, and The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

Haddox’s recent book looks at works by a wide variety of authors, including Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, and the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans. Through the work of these writers, he demonstrates the presence of the Catholic Church in the southern cultural tradition. Haddox writes, “Certain styles and characterizations of both southerness and Catholicism may come into being, flourish for a time, disappear, and reappear, but their variety precludes any stable definition of either term in the larger American cultural arena.”