Griswold Named Bergen Evans Professor In the Humanities

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Wendy Griswold, professor of sociology at Northwestern University, has been named the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities.

She also has appointments in comparative literary studies and English in the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the School of Communication. She directs the Culture and Society Workshop at the University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Griswold's academic interests include cultural sociology; sociological approaches to literature, art and religion; regionalism, urban representations and the culture of place; the Federal Writers Project; and comparative studies of reading practices.

She is writing the second of a three-book series on how the essays of the American Guides -- a series of state guidebooks that the WPA's Federal Writers Project produced in the late 1930s during the New Deal -- definitively shaped the American culture of place. The first book of the series was "Regionalism and the Reading Class," published this year.

Griswold's other books include "Cultures and Societies in a Changing World" (third edition, 2008) and "Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers and the Novel in Nigeria" (2000), which won the Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Culture Section and was chosen an outstanding academic book by Choice, the journal for academic libraries.

Griswold has a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a project called "The Federal Writers' Project and American Regionalism." She also has received fellowships from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center and the Chicago Institute for the Humanities.

Griswold taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago before joining the Northwestern faculty in 1997. She holds an external professorship at the University of Oslo.