English Department Events
Brannon Costello, UT English PhD, wins inaugural Tennessee Alumni Promise Award
Brannon Costello, Associate Professor of Southern Literature in the English Department at LSU and a 2004 graduate of our English Ph.D. program, has been selected as one of the inaugural winners of the Tennessee Alumni Promise Award, designed to recognize alumni no older than 40 years of age who have demonstrated distinctive achievement in career, civic involvement, or both. This award is presented to acknowledge alumni who are making a mark early on in their career.
Brannon is the author of Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945-1971, which argues persuasively for new attention to the often neglected issue of class in southern literary studies. Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviors associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy—especially, those of racial paternalism—were believed to be essential for white southerners. The wealthy employed them to validate their identities as "aristocrats," while less-affluent whites used them to separate themselves from "white trash" in the social hierarchy. Even those who were not legitimate heirs of plantation-owning families found that "putting on airs" associated with the legacy of the plantation could align them with the forces of power and privilege and offer them a measure of authority in the public arena that they might otherwise lack.
Brannon examines the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, and others and argues that this work reveals that the racial paternalism central to class formation and mobility in the South was unraveling in the years after World War II, when the civil rights movement and the South's increasing industrialization dramatically altered southern life. Costello demonstrates that these writers were keenly aware of the ways in which the changes sweeping the South complicated the deeply embedded structures that governed the relationship between race and class. He further contends that the collapse of racial paternalism as a means of organizing class lies at the heart of their most important works—including Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and her essay "The ‘Pet Negro' System," Welty's Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart, Faulkner's The Mansion and The Reivers, Gaines's Of Love and Dust and his story "Bloodline," and Percy's The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins.
The book started as a dissertation at Tennessee, directed by Mary Papke. Actively publishing even as a graduate student, Brannon was hired as a specialist in Southern fiction at LSU, where he’s taught courses on Race and Class in Southern Literature, as well as courses devoted specifically to the work of Eudora Welty and Richard Wright. More recently he has been turning his attention to the aesthetics and cultural significance of comic books and graphic novels.
Brannon received the award during a ceremony on September 11. At the same event Howard Baker was given a Distinguished Alumnus Award, as did—posthumously—the film director Clarence Brown. We would like to congratulate Brannon on his achievements and wish him continued good fortune in his career.