Walter Reed
Ph.D., English, Yale University, 1969

Research Interests

Dr. Reed became Director of the ILA in the fall of 2002. He had served for six years previously as the Director of Emory’s Center for Teaching and Curriculum; before that he was Chair of the English Department. Long involved with the Comparative Literature Program, which had been for many years a concentration within the ILA before it became a separate program, he has served on a number of ILA dissertation committees and taught several courses with ILA cross-listing. As a Gustafson Scholar, he helped lead for several years the interdisciplinary Gustafson Faculty Seminar for faculty from across the university.

He taught at Yale for seven years before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, where he became Professor of English and Director of the Program in Comparative Literature before coming to Emory in 1987. In 2000 he received the University Scholar Teacher Award at Emory.

Publications

• Meditations on the Hero: The Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Yale, 1987)
• An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago, 1981)
• Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin (Oxford, 1993)

Projects

Currently working on a new book on concepts of personhood in the literature of the Romantic period, drawing on the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Courses

Reed worked with Allen Tullos in establishing the popular IDS course “American Routes: Tradition and Transformation in American Musical Cultures,” after offering his own interdisciplinary course “Elvis Presley and American Culture.”

His recent teaching includes courses in British, American and European Romanticism, the modern short story, and the history of reading.

In 2005, he will teach the writings of Bakhtin with two faculty members from other departments, and an interdisciplinary course on "water".