Peggy Whitman Prenshaw

[from Mississippi Book Festival Facebook page]
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw is the Millsaps College Humanities Scholar in Residence and retired (emerita) Fred C. Frey chair of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (1991-2004). Prenshaw is a Mississippi native, a graduate of Mississippi College and a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Texas-Austin.

In 1994 she was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize in ceremonies at the White House for her outstanding contribution to the public humanities. In subsequent years she received the LSU University Medal for outstanding achievement in the humanities and the Humanist of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

In 1999 she was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the National Council for the Humanities. She has served on the board of the Louisiana Endowment, as chair of the Mississippi Humanities Council, and as a consulting scholar for the Kettering Foundation's project on the humanities and public deliberation.

Prenshaw has written and edited books on Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, contemporary southern women writers, and on southern cultural history. Her most recent book, Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography (LSU Press) was winner of the 2011 Jules and Frances Landry Award.

Before joining the faculty at LSU, she was dean of the Honors College at the University of Southern Mississippi, where for seventeen years she edited the Southern Quarterly, a journal of the arts in the South. Since 1982 she has served as general editor of the Literary Conversations series published by the University Press of Mississippi. Conversations with Eudora Welty, which she edited, was the first volume of this series, which now includes over one hundred volumes of collected interviews with 20th and 21st century writers.

Having twice given presentations on Welty in Moscow, Prenshaw has also given invited papers on Walker Percy and on Welty at conferences in Denmark and on Welty's political thought at a conference in Cambridge, England. More recently, as a Fulbright scholar, she participated in a six-week study program in China that focused upon public policies related to the lives of women and children.

She is a past president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, which in 2010 awarded her the Richard Beale Davis Prize for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Southern Letters. She also holds the Phoenix Award for distinguished achievement in Eudora Welty scholarship and has served as the Welty Society president.