Jim Coby, Ph.D.

Phone:

765-455-9312

Email:

jcoby@iu.edu

Department:

Department of English and Language Studies

Campus:

IU Kokomo

Biography

As an undergraduate, I once complained to a teacher that I didn’t find some of their selections for our class “interesting,” and then inquired how I might ever survive graduate school if I was turned off by certain texts. “Easy,” the professor responded, “Be interested in everything!” Taking those words to heart, I find myself interested in a wide-range of literary theories, genres, and modalities.

An Americanist by training (and a southerner by birth), my research largely revolves around literature of the American South. I’m particularly interested in questions of identity and how one’s experiences with traumatic events (especially weather-related traumas) necessitate new paths of self and community understanding. Within the geographic region defined as the “South,” I find myself particularly drawn to narratives of Appalachia and the Gulf Coast (so, you’ll often find Ron Rash or Jesmyn Ward on my syllabi). I also serve as Editor-in-Chief of IU Kokomo’s student journal Field: A Journal of Arts and Sciences (speaking of, you should totally submit your art, fiction, poetry, music, research, or prose here: iuk.edu/field). Beyond my interest in southern literature, I teach and research environmental literature and ecocriticism, comics and graphic novels, American realism and naturalism, science fiction, and contemporary American literature.

Recent Publications:

Edited Collection:

BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence. Collection edited with Dr. Joanna Davis-McElligatt. University Press of Mississippi (2024).

Recent Publications:

“Weird Books for Weird Times.” Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom: Forthcoming.

“Imaginary Archives: Ambient and Analog Horrors.” American Gothic Studies: Forthcoming.

“The Bone Machine in the Garden: Listening to Tom Waits in the Anthropocene.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 10.3 (2024): 121-134.

“Introduction.” BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence. Co-written with Joanna Davis-McElligatt. (2024): 3-18.

“‘It’s football, sir. It’s worth the blood’: The ‘Violence That Finds Us’ in Latour and Aaron’s Southern Bastards.” BOOM! SPLAT!: Comics and Violence. (2024): 150-160.

“On Publishing a Campus Literary Journal.” Co-authored with Saul Lemerond. Indiana English (2023): 36-49.

“Life After Death in Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible.” Stratified Nature in Women’s Writing: Past, Present, and Future (2023): 3-18.

“‘Her perfume was moonshine’: Alcohol and Gender in Franklin and Fennelly’s The Tilted World” Journal of the Georgia Philological Association (2022): 29-41.

“The Gulf South.” Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (2022): 308-311.

“A Department Responds to COVID.” Co-authored with Members of the IUK English and Language Studies Faculty. Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine (2021): https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol6/iss1/30/

“Diffused Feeling: Threat Environments and Affective Labor in William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms].” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 75.1 (2021): 11-26.

“Reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Science Fiction 4.1 (2020): 15-16.