Douglas Reichert Powell

Doug Reichert Powell has received degrees from Northeastern University (Ph.D. '99), East Tennessee State University (M.A. '92) and Washington and Lee University (B.A. '90). His interest in social constructions of place and region (especially the southern Appalachian mountains) underwrites his research and writing in popular culture, landscape, literature, composition studies, and critical pedagogy. His publications and presentations cover subjects ranging from the 1998 manhunt for Eric Rudolph to the 1916 hanging of a circus elephant. In addition to publishing essays and reviews in Appalachian Journal, Historical Geography, and Southern Exposure , he has served as an editor of the Media section of The Encyclopedia of Appalachia (University of Tennessee Press, 2006) . Doug's book, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape , will be published in the Spring of 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press. Currently, he's at work on an edited collection about place and writing pedagogy, tentatively titled Composing Other Spaces. In the Summer of 2005, with the support of a Faculty Development Grant, he began work on a project about the aesthetics and poetics of commercial caverns (or "show caves," as they are known in the trade). Doug has taught Introduction to Cultural Studies, Reviewing the Arts, and Literature of the Environment, and looks forward to designing more course about the cultural politics of contemporary American spaces and places.

Prior to joining the faculty of Columbia College Chicago English department, Doug was associate director of the University Writing Program at Duke University, and has also taught at Miami University of Ohio, Northeastern, East Tennessee State, and Northeast State Community College (TN). He is also a musician, hiker, voter, spouse, and father of Charlie (b. 2001) and Elizabeth (b. 2003).