It may be summertime, but Lyon College faculty members keep up their scholarly work. Here’s what some of them have been or are doing this summer:

Dr. Terrell Tebbetts, the Brown Professor of English, prepared and submitted for publication a transcript of an interview he conducted with novelist Lee Smith during her visit to campus in the spring.

“In the interview I ask her to talk about various ways she has used Faulkner’s work as she has written her own, especially two of her novels, Family Linen and her recent The Last Girls,” Dr., Tebbetts said.

“I completed research on and am currently writing a critical article on Lee Smith’s Family Linen, exploring how she uses a plot and narrative technique similar to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” Dr. Tebbetts said. “In both novels, a family’s mother is lying near death and dies, and her adult children alternate in telling bits of the family’s story as the novels progress. But Smith interestingly turns the climactic event away from the burial of the mother, concentrating instead on the discovery of the murder of the father and the disinterment of his remains. Smith’s novel makes that destructive father, not Faulkner’s destructive mother, the source of the family’s dysfunctions, but exposing it allows the family to work toward new harmony and productivity.”

Dr. Tebbetts is co-directing two “Teaching Faulkner” sessions at the annual Faulkner and Yoknatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi at the end of July. This will the second time he’s been a conference leader. He presented a scholarly paper there five years ago.

Dr. John Weinzierl, assistant professor of history, recently received a Summer Faculty Research Grant to work on the topic of war, popular culture and comics. He will be researching in the archives of Michigan State University this summer.

“I am working with two students (Directed Research),” Dr. Weinzierl said. “One is studying women’s history, the other is interviewing veterans (WWII, Korea, Vietnam) locally and contributing to the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.”

Dr. Weinzierl also led a group of 20 Lyon students in a Nichols Travel Program trip to Paris to study the city’s history and culture. The group explored ancient, medieval, and modern sites, as well as studied museum collections and architecture. Some of the highlights included Versailles, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Hotel des Invalides, Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Marais district, and many others. The group stayed two weeks and had a chance to immerse themselves in the city, working on language skills and enjoying all elements of culture.