South Atlantic Association of Departments of English Outstanding Teacher
Ed. with Mark Newman. Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South since 1920. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2006.
Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Ed. Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature. Signet Classic, 2003.
Ed. with Sharon Monteith. South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
Ed. Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White. University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
Ed. Writing the Woman Artist: Essays on Poetics, Politics, and Portraiture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
“The Divided Reception of The Help.” Southern Cultures 20.1 (Spring 2014): 7-25.
“The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler’s 'Sugar Cage,'” Mississippi Quarterly 65.1 (Winter 2012): 81-99.
“Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris,” Transatlantica : Revue d’Études Américaines, 1 (2011).
"Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough to Tell." The Southern Quarterly 47.2 (Winter 2010): 24-38.
The Southern Family Farm as Endangered Species: Possibilities for Survival in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer." The Southern Literary Journal (Winter 2006). 83-97. Also published in Poverty and Progress in the U. S. South Since 1920.177-87.
Who Is a Southern Writer?" American Literature (December 2006). 725-27
The 'beyondness of things' in The Buccaneers: Vernon Lee's Influence on Edith Wharton's Sense of Places." Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 8.1 (2004). 7-30.
"The Shell Seekers and Working Women Readers' Search for Serenity." Women: A Cultural Review 10.3 (Fall 1999): 326-340.
"Edith Wharton's "Secret Sensitiveness" The Decoration of Houses, and Her Fiction." Journal of Modern Literature 21.2 (Winter 1997): 175-196.
Reconstructing Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Narrative Closure in Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying." Masculinities 3.2 (Summer 1995): 43-66.
"The Miller-Matisse Connection: A Matter of Aesthetics." Journal of American Studies 21.3 (December 1987): 411-415.
"City Folks in Hoot Owl Holler: Narrative Strategy in Lee Smith's Oral History." The Southern Literary Journal 20.1 (Fall 1987): 101-212.
"Place, Perception, and Identity in The Awakening." The Southern Quarterly 25.2 (Winter 1987): 108-119.
"Absalom, Absalom! and the Custom of Storytelling: A Reflection of Southern Social and Literary History." Southern Studies 29.1 (Spring 1985): 82-112.
"Nicole's Gardens." Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1978. Ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Richard Layman. Gale Research Company, 1979: 85-95.
“Their Confederate Kinfolk, African Americans’ Interracial Family Histories.” The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South. Ed. Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
“Black and White.” Keywords for Southern Studies. Ed. Scott Romine and Jennifer Greeson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016.
“The Haitian Connection and the Burden of Southern History in Connie May Fowler’s Sugar Cage.” Unsteadily Marching On: The U.S. South in Motion. Ed. Constante González Groba. València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2013. 203-213.
"The Obama Effect on American Discourse about Racial Identity: Dreams from My Father (and Mother), Barack Obama's Search for Self." The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign. Ed. Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, Catherine E. Squires. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. 131-152.
"Tragic No More?: The Reappearance of the Racially Mixed Character." American Fiction of the 1990s. Ed. Jay Prosser. London: Routledge, 2008. 89-103.
"Black Girl in Paris: Shay Youngblood's Escape from ‘the last plantation.'" Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe-Europe in the American South. Ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Richard Gray. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007. 563-578. Also published in South Atlantic Review 73.3 (Summer 2008): 44-60.
"Childhood Trauma and its Reverberations in Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine." Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination. Ed. Harriet Pollack and Christopher Mettress. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 161-77.
"Interracial Love, Virginians' Lies, and Donald McCaig's Jacob's Ladder." Virginia's Civil War. Ed. Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. University of Virginia Press, 2005. 176-85.
"I'll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians." South to a New Place. Ed. Jones and Monteith. Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 121-46.
"Race Relations." The Companion to Southern Literature. Ed. Joseph Flora and Lucinda MacKethan. Louisiana State University Press, 2002: 709-714.
“New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines’s Fiction.” The World Is Our Home: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing. Ed. Jeffrey Folks. University of Kentucky Press, 2000: 29-52
"Dismantling Stereotypes: Interracial Friendships in Meridian and A Mother and Two Daughters." The Female Tradition in Southern Literature: Essays on Southern Women Writers. Ed. Carol Manning. University of Illinois Press, 1993: 140-157; and in Contemporary Literary Criticism. GaleNet, 2000.
"Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne Porter's 'Old Mortality.'" Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. University Press of Virginia, 1993: 280-299; and in Critical Essays on American Literature: Katherine Anne Porter. Ed. Darlene Harbour Unrue. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997.
"Refighting Old Wars: Race Relations and Masculine Conventions in Fiction by Larry Brown and Madison Smartt Bell." in The Present State of Mind: Southern Identity in the 1990s. Ed. Jan Nordby Gretlund. University of South Carolina Press, 1999: 107-120.
Foreword to George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1879). University of Georgia Press, 1988: v-xv.
"Two Settings, The Islands and the City." Modern Language Association Approaches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening. Ed. Bernard Koloski. Modern Language Association, 1988: 120-125.
