Nominations for 2025 are now closed. Nominations for 2026 will open in December 2025 and will close on the 2026 panel submission deadline date (TBA Spring 2026).Nominations for Honorary Member should be made via email to samla@gsu.edu. Accepting a nomination implies attendance at the annual conference, where the winner will be announced at our awards ceremony.
SAMLA’s Honorary Member Award recognizes individuals for significant scholarly work and professional contribution in their respective fields of study.
The Honorary Member Committee receives nominations and makes its recommendation to the Executive Committee. Their selection is affirmed by the membership at the annual business meeting during each year’s conference.
Click here for a complete list of previous Honorary Member honorees.
2025 Honorary Member
John G. Peters
University of North Texas
Click here to read our interview with Dr. Peters!
John Peters is the author of Joseph Conrad and the Narration of Silence (Edinburgh 2024), Silence, Space and Absence in Conrad’s Works (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), Joseph Conrad’s Critical Reception (Cambridge 2013), a history of the commentary on Conrad, which was 2nd runner-up for the tri-annual Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies, and Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge 2001), which considers Joseph Conrad’s works in light of the epistemological underpinning of impressionism. Conrad and Impressionism was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001 and was runner-up for the Adam Gillon Book Award. He is also author of The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (2006) and editor of A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad (Oxford 2010), Conrad in the Public Eye (Rodopi 2008), Conrad’s Drama (Brill 2019; Honorable Mention for the Adam Gillon Book Award), Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (Broadview 2010), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Broadview 2019), volume two of Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge 2012), and the Norton Critical Edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer and Other Stories (2015). He is translator of Takamura Kōtarō’s book The Chieko Poems (Green Integer 2007; Revised edition 2025) and received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts to translate Takamura’s book Journey. His articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Philosophy and Literature, College Literature, English Language Notes, English Literature in Transition, Victorian Review, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is a past President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America and current General Editor of Conradiana, the oldest journal in Conrad studies, for which he received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Phoenix Award for 2017. He has received the Joseph Conrad Society of America’s highest honor, the Ian Watt Prize for Excellence in Conrad Scholarship, was First Runner-Up for the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America’s Wacław Lednicki Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 2020, and was a finalist for the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America’s Susanne M. Lotarski Distinguished Achievement Award (2024). Conrad and Nature (an essay collection co-edited with Lissa Schneider-Rebozo and Jeffrey Mathis McCarthy) was recently selected as Co-Winner of the Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies. John Peters has also received the President’s Council University Service Award for 2016, the Toulouse Graduate School’s Toulouse Scholar Award for 2020, the Office of Research and Innovation’s Research Leadership Award for 2020, and the UNT Foundation’s Eminent Faculty Award for 2018, the university’s highest honor. Finally, a November 20, 2017 article in The New Yorker magazine refers to him as “the leading American Conradian.” His main areas of interest are Conrad studies, British Modernism, Victorian literature, American Modernism, and Japanese translation. Along with his translation of Takamura’s book Journey, he is currently working on a book project on the aesthetics of perception in the works of Oscar Wilde.
Honorary Member Award Committee
Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson (2025)
Texas State University at San Marcos
Donavan L. Ramon (2026)
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Renée M. Silverman (2027)
Florida International University
Rob L. Turner (2028)
University of South Dakota
If you are interested in committee service, please contact the SAMLA office via email.
2023 Honorary Member
Gerald J. Prince is Professor of
Romance Languages, Associate
Faculty at the Annenberg School of
Communication, and a member of
the graduate groups in Linguistics
and in Comparative Literature at the
University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of several books
(including Métaphysique et technique
dans l’œuvre romanesque de Sartre; A
Grammar of Stories; Narratology:
The Form and Functioning of Narrative; A Dictionary of Narratology; Narrative as Theme; Guide du roman de langue française: 1901-
1950; and Guide du roman de langue française: 1951-2000) as well
as many articles and reviews in the fields of (narrative) theory and of
modern (French) literature.Translated in more than a dozen languages, member of the editorial or advisory board of over a dozen scholarly journals, and General Editor of the “Stages” series for the University of Nebraska Press, Prince received in 2013 the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Below are some excerpts from Hilary Dannenberg’s write-up on Prince following his Lifetime
Achievement Award: In terms of ideas, Gerald Prince’s rigorous theorizing of narrative in its many aspects has informed, inspired and encouraged
many other scholars of narrative. The following key areas and
concepts were invented or developed in his work: the narratee;
the disnarrated; narrativity; narrative grammar; scholarship of
the French novel; the art of studying narrative through minimal
narratives; postcolonial narrative; narrative and gender.
Both in his written work and in his contributions at conferences,
therefore, he has a tremendous gift for facilitating thought and
discussion in other academics. His own academic work attains a
marvelous combination of rigorous academic focus, argumentation, analytical precision and expressive power coupled with his
spirit of lightness, humour and wit which often shines through
from underneath the academic precision.
2022 Honorary Member
Kathleen Blake Yancey, Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Florida State University, was awarded her BA and MA in English from Virginia Tech and her PhD in English, with a specialization in Rhetoric and Composition, from Purdue University. After teaching part-time while her children were small, she began her academic career at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), where she taught numerous courses, among them in literature, writing, English education, and honors. Co-director of the UNCC site of the National Writing Project, she also worked with the honors program to design a capstone portfolio. In 1999, she moved to Clemson, where she was the R. Roy Pearce Professor and directed the Pearce Center for Professional Communication, a faculty development center supporting Communication across the Curriculum. As part of that effort, she led the development and creation of the Class of 1941 Studio for Student Communication. In 2005, she took up her post as Kellogg Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, her charge to re-build a dormant graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition. Working with colleagues, she also created FSU’s two Digital Studios and helped develop a new major, Editing, Writing, and Media, which is the subject of her 2016 co-authored award-winning essay in South Atlantic Review: “Program Sustainability: Curricular Resilience in Florida State University’s Editing, Writing, and Media Concentration.”
Yancey has served in several leadership positions, among them as President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA); Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); and President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). Co-founder of the journal Assessing Writing, she co-edited it from 1994-2001; she also served as editor of the flagship journal College Composition and Communication from 2010-2014. She has also guest edited several journals, including South Atlantic Review’s 2020 special issue on everyday writing. Author, editor, or co-editor of 16 scholarly books–among them Portfolios in the Writing Classroom; Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing; A Rhetoric of Reflection; Assembling Composition; and ePortfolio-as-Curriculum–she has also authored co/authored over 100 articles and book chapters, frequently with colleagues. One area of focus is her research on transfer of writing knowledge and practice, which has won awards from CCCC and CWPA; it has also been taken up in a first-of-its-kind collaborative transfer study by faculty in 8 US institutions—5 universities and 3 community colleges. A second research focus is portfolios, both print and electronic; this scholarship has been presented across the country and around the world, including in Canada, Singapore, Australia, Norway, the UK, and Ireland. Currently, she is a consultant for an ePortfolio project supporting pharmacy and medical school students at Trinity College in Dublin.
Yancey is the recipient of several awards, among them the Florida State University Distinguished Research Professorship; the CCCC Research Impact Award; the best book award from the Council of Writing Program Administrators (twice); the Donald Murray Prize; the FSU Graduate Teaching Award (twice); the FSU Graduate Mentor Award; the Purdue Distinguished Woman Scholar Award; the CCCC Exemplar Award; and the NCTE Squire Award.
2021 Honorary Member
Trudier Harris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with a B.A. degree in English and Social Studies in 1969; she received her degree in three years. She earned her M.A. from The Ohio State University in 1972 and her Ph.D. from Ohio State in 1973. She s now University Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama and formerly J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught courses in African American literature and folklore. In addition to lecturing throughout the United States, as well as in Jamaica, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, England, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, Harris has written and edited twenty-six books, including Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (2009), Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014), and a memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (2003), which was chosen by the Orange County, North Carolina, Commission on Human Relations to inaugurate its “One-Book, One-Community” Reading Program for 2003-2004. Harris has received numerous teaching awards, including, in 2005, the Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also received several awards for lifetime achievement in literary studies, including the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for selection as Alabama’s Distinguished Literary Scholar (2002). During the fall semester of 2006, she was Faculty Director of an Honors Study Abroad Seminar in Cape Town, South Africa.
Her alma mater, Stillman College, has recognized Harris for several achievements. In 2010, Stillman College awarded Harris an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree. In 2013, she was inducted into the Stillman College Educator Hall of Fame. And, in 2018, Stillman bestowed a Distinguished Alumni Recognition upon Harris.
In March of 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created the “Trudier Harris Distinguished Professorship” in her honor. In 2017, The College of William and Mary honored Harris as its first tenured African American faculty member (in 1979) and presented her with an honorary degree at its 325th Charter Day celebration in 2018. In 2018, she also received the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literary Studies and was awarded a Resident Fellowship to the National Humanities Center for 2018-2019, where she worked on her current book project, “Depictions of Home in African American Literature.” Harris was named the recipient of the 2018 Clarence E. Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing and won the 2018 SEC Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Alabama (which is a “Professor of Year” designation).
Harris is a Zeta DOVE (50 years of membership) and a member of the Beta Eta Zeta Graduate Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is also a founding member of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective, which celebrated its 34th anniversary in 2021.
2018 Honorary Member
Allen Josephs is a world-renowned Hemingway scholar and past president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. His published works on Spanish culture include the critically-acclaimed Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida, four critical editions of the works of Federico Garcia Lorca, and numerous essays in The Atlantic, New Republic, and New York Times Book Review, among others.
He has been University Research Professor at the University of West Florida since 1986 [where he began teaching in 1969]. Professor Josephs has been awarded the George B. Smith Arts and Letters Award by the National Association of Taurine Clubs [for Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida] and an honorary membership in the Taurine Bibliophiles of America for his “outstanding contributions to taurine scholarship.”
In 2014, New Street Communications published his On Hemingway and Spain: Essays and Reviews, 1979-2013, and in 2016, On Cormac McCarthy: Essays on Mexico, Crime, Hemingway and God. He has just finished a translation of Fernando Valverde’s The Insistence of Harm and is currently at work on a translation of Raquel Lanseros poetry. Dr. Josephs served as SAMLA President in 2008.
2018 Posthumous Honorary Member
Born in Puerto Rico, Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952-2016) was among the first Latinx writers published by university and mainstream publishing houses. National acclaim for a rising poet came with Terms of Survival (1987). Her first novel, The Line of the Sun (1989) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In Silent Dancing (1990), a collection of creative non-fiction essays and poetry, Ortiz Cofer draws from autobiographical memoirs as an immigrant child raised in Paterson, New Jersey. The Puerto Rican barrio was central in her short-story “Nada,” which received The O. Henry Award, and in The Latin Deli (1993), a collection of short stories, poetry, and creative non-fiction essays, also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Her novels include Call Me María (2004) and The Meaning of Consuelo (2003). Collections of short stories and poems are The Year of Our Revolution (1998) and A Love Story Beginning in Spanish (2005). She also wrote youth literature: An Island Like You (1995) and Animal Jamboree: Latino Folktales (2012), collections of stories.
Woman in Front of the Sun (1999) explores the complex physical and psychological processes as a Latina writer. She furthered a feminist interest as co-editor of Sleeping With One Eye Open (2000), essays by women writers facing gender-based obstacles. Her last work, The Cruel Country, is a memoir that documents how Judith bravely faced the duties of taking care of her dying mother.
Until her retirement in 2013, Ortiz Cofer was the Franklin Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Georgia.
(Photo Credit: John Cofer)
2017 Honorary Member
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). In his citation, Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote, “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.” Her most recent collection is Thrall (2012): exploring her own interracial and complicated roots she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America. Her other collections are Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Trethewey is also the author of the prose book Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press). A memoir is forthcoming in 2017.
Among her many honors, Trethewey is the recipient of the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In the judge’s citation, Marilyn Nelson said: “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.” Trethewey has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry. At Northwestern University, she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English.
In her second term as United States Poet Laureate, Trethewey’s signature project was a PBS NewsHour Poetry Series Where Poetry Lives. In this series, Trethewey traveled with Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown to cities across the United States in order to explore societal issues such as Alzheimer’s, domestic abuse, the civil rights movement, and incarcerated teenagers—all through the prism of poetry, literature, and Trethewey’s own personal experiences.
In addition to being United States Poet Laureate, she held the position of State Poet Laureate of Mississippi, from 2012-2016.
2016 Honorary Member
A native of southern Georgia who took a BA in Chemistry (1955) and an MA in English (1957) from Mercer University, Weldon Thornton came to UNC-Chapel Hill in 1961 after earning his Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas in Austin. He taught full-time at UNC-Chapel Hill for 44 years, retiring as the William and Jeanne H. Jordan Professor of English in 2005. His service to UNC-Chapel Hill took many forms. He helped revise the undergraduate curriculum in the 1970s and served many positions in the department. He also annually hosted a memorable pig picking, at which some 200 members of the department—graduate students and faculty—gathered. He was a uniter, not a divider, who asked for and got the very highest standards from his students and fellow faculty members. In recognition of his sustained commitment to the humanities at Chapel Hill, Thornton gave the 2003 E. Maynard Adams Lecture in the Humanities, “Are Our Universities Failing Their Intellectual Mission?”
During his career, Thornton established himself as one of the pre-eminent scholars of twentieth-century British and Irish literature in the world, authoring the still-in-print Allusions in Joyce’s Ulysses (UNC Press, 1968, multiple reprintings), J. M. Synge and the Western Mind (Colin Smythe, 1975), D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1993), The Anti-Modernism of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Syracuse UP, 1994), and Voices and Values in Ulysses (U of Florida P, 2000). He also edited Approaches to Teaching Joyce’s Ulysses with Robert Newman (U of Delaware P, 1987). Just this list of publications would not justify him as an Honorary Life Member of SAMLA, but understanding their impact in the field goes some way toward doing so. The Allusions book has become such a staple of Joyce scholarship that as I say, it is still in print 48 years later. Surveying the Joyce scholarship over the last nearly 50 years shows how often it is still cited—and not simply to confirm a reading of a particular episode in the novel, but often to justify taking an “allusive” approach to the novel in all its complexity. Long before the rise of cultural studies as a discipline, Thornton’s Allusions book showed the importance of understanding an author as encyclopedic as Joyce in the religious, historical, literary, and cultural contexts of his early 1900s Dublin milieu. Moreover, each of his following works was similarly ground-breaking: his Synge book was the first study of that great but short-lived playwright to take his religious life seriously. There is really Synge scholarship pre- and post-Thornton. Post-Thorntonian Synge scholarship recognizes that even though Synge left his fundamentalist Protestant faith, he nevertheless was often concerned to depict issues of faith in his plays, such as the syncretistic milieu we find in one of his masterpieces, Riders to the Sea (1904). Thornton’s Lawrence book remains one of the only book-length studies of that great modernist author’s short fiction and I have heard many Lawrence scholars praise it at length.
I should add that all of Thornton’s scholarship is inherently teaching-oriented. For instance, when I taught the Baylor short fiction survey a few years ago, I went straight to his Lawrence book and was relieved to find such thoughtful readings that were attentive to the way in which our readings of those stories evolve and change over time. Thornton might not accept the term “reader-response” criticism, but what strikes me about his critical books like his study of Lawrence is their extreme sensitivity, not just to issues of close reading, but also to how those issues redound on us as readers, throwing us back on ourselves and making us question what we really believe about these characters, even about ourselves. Thornton’s most recent two books on Joyce have similarly changed the subfield of Joyce studies. The book on Portrait illustrates comprehensively the imagistic cast of Joyce’s mind (for instance, with the bird motif Stephen tries to break from and then ultimately embraces) and shows how carefully that novel’s structure is designed. Voices and Values in Ulysses, I think, remains ahead of its time but is slowly gaining critical traction in its insistence that that great novel was not simply a polyphony of styles, all of which Joyce privileged equally (as Karen Lawrence would have it in her 1981 study, Joyce’s Odyssey of Style), but that he did indeed write the first six episodes in an “initial style,” after which he wrote the remaining twelve episodes in a variety of styles to parody particular, pernicious worldviews or ideologies, such as writing “Sirens” as a Expressionistic play to critique a Freudian viewpoint. Reorienting Joyce in this context shows him to be truly a modernist, not a postmodernist, as many Joyce critics would now have it. For a number of years, Professor Thornton has been working on a wonderful intellectual history, The Roots of Modernism, a book that would in many ways function as a summa of his career. It will enlighten us about the many underlying philosophical biases we continue to express as Westerners, products of the Enlightenment.
Professor Thornton served on a variety of editorial boards over the years, including the D. H. Lawrence Review, James Joyce Quarterly, and the University of Kentucky’s Irish Literary series. He served as a referee for various scholarly journals, including PMLA, during his career, and was a reader for many university presses. For some years, he also served on the selection committee for the prestigious Richard Ellmann lectures at Emory University.
Professor Thornton is a long-time supporter of SAMLA and has often given papers there over the years, remaining active into his retirement by appearing, for example, on Dr. Joseph Flora’s recent Great Books Panel. In 2013, Professor Flora organized a special panel at SAMLA to recognize Professor Thornton’s work in the field and longtime commitment to SAMLA. We had representatives in English, American, and Irish literature from three professors who worked with him in the 1970s (Panthea Reid Broughton, emerita, LSU), 1980s (John Rickard, Bucknell University), and 1990s (myself). That panel, which was filled with past students of Professor Thornton, exemplified his commitment to multiple generations of students, for, despite all his many outstanding scholarly achievements, he remains the professor most dedicated to his students’ success—whether they went on to graduate school in English literature or not—that I or many others have ever met. Now Professor Emeritus at UNC, Dr. Thornton remains active at the university and in the profession. I give him my highest recommendation for Honorary Life membership in SAMLA. (Nomination by Richard Rankin Russell, Baylor University)
2015 Honorary Member
H. R. Stoneback (PhD, Vanderbilt, 1970) is Distinguished Professor of English of the State University of New York. He has taught at SUNY-New Paltz since 1969. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Senior Fulbright Professor at Peking University (Beijing, China), and Saint-John Perse Fellow of the French-American Foundation in Aix-en-Provence. As author or editor, he has published 35 books, roughly half literary criticism, and half books of his poetry. His much-praised Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (2007)was placed on the short list of recommended critical studies for the national Agrégation Examination in France.Recent work includes the co-edited Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (2013) and the co-edited Affirming the Gold Thread: Aldington, Hemingway, Pound & Imagism in Torcello and Venice (2014). He has authored more than 200 essays, including major work on William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Robert Penn Warren. Stoneback’s award-winning poetry has been published in scores of journals in the U.S. and abroad and translated into Chinese, French, Irish, Italian, Provençal and other languages.
He has served as an officer of numerous literary and cultural organizations in the U. S. and France. From 2011-2013 he served on the executive board and as Vice-President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is a founder and Vice-President of the International Aldington Society and a founder and Honorary President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. In 2014 he was elected to serve (2014-2017) as President of the Hemingway Foundation & Society. Among his numerous honors and awards, he especially cherishes his 2013 gubernatorial commission as a Kentucky Colonel—and wonders what benefits (such as certain legendary products of Kentucky) accompany his
colonel’s commission.
Now in his sixth decade with SAMLA, he has presented dozens of papers at the yearly meetings. In 2008 he was the Annual Critical Plenary Speaker at the convention in Louisville; at the same meeting, an “Honoring H. R. Stoneback” session featured tributes to his work by 17 scholars and writers (later published in Knowledge Carried to the Heart: A Festschrift for H. R. Stoneback, ed. Matthew Nickel, 2010). In recent years, he has been a presenter and performer in most of the SAMLA featured special sessions on “Music and Poetry.” Since the 1970s he has led about 50 of his graduate students to SAMLA, where they have presented more than 100 papers. In sum, Stoneback notes, “My SAMLA connection has been the longest and happiest professional affiliation in a long career.”
