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Louisiana State Professor Brannon Costello Delivers Lipsey Lecture at Mississippi College


LSU English professor & Mississippi College graduate Brannon Costello, guest speaker for the 2015 Lipsey Lecture Series at MC

An expert on Southern literature, graphic novels and comic books, Louisiana State University professor Brannon Costello will discuss some of his favorite subjects at Mississippi College.

It will be a homecoming of sorts for Costello when he delivers the keynote address at the 44th Lipsey Lecture Series at his alma mater in Clinton.

His March 26 lecture at the B.C. Rogers Board Meeting Room is free and open to the public. The program begins at 7 p.m. An audience of students, faculty, staff and other members of metro Jackson’s literary community will be on hand that Thursday evening to welcome the Mississippi native.

A 39-year-old English professor, Costello cherishes the lessons learned from his undergraduate studies at Mississippi College in the late 1990s. “It’s no exaggeration to say the courses I took at MC’s English Department changed my life.”

A graduate of Tri-County Academy in Flora, Costello says Mississippi College’s diverse mixture of classes remains “the bedrock” of his current teaching and research duties on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge.

His English classes at MC, he said, “opened my eyes to new ways of understanding literature,” and remains grateful to his professors at the Baptist-affiliated university. The MC alumnus earned his master’s at the University of Southern Mississippi and doctorate at the University of Tennessee.

The Sue Price Lipsey Lecture Series is Mississippi College’s way of annually showcasing scholarship in the humanities.

Costello “represents the great work that our alumni are doing whether in the larger academic community beyond MC” or other fields, says Jonathan Randle, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

During his career as a professor and author, Costello has achieved much success in a varied field of Southern literature, he said.

The LSU educator has penned academic articles for publications like the “Southern Quarterly” and “Mississippi Quarterly.” His book published by the LSU Press in 2007 is titled “Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism & the Transformation of Class in Southern Fiction 1945-71.”

He’s the recipient of the Richard Updike Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Delighted and honored to be invited to MC as a Lipsey lecturer, Costello will tackle a big topic during his 60-minute talk and question/answer session. His remarks will focus on comic books, serial narratives and literary culture in the South.

In recent years, other speakers in the Lipsey Lecture series have included Mississippi State University English professor Ted Atkinson, and Warren J. Carson, an author and professor at South Carolina Upstate in Spartenburg.