Will Gray
Education and Experience
Will received his BA and MA in English from a private liberal arts university in South Carolina, and completed the Summer Programme in English Literature at the University of Oxford in 2000. He has been involved with the T S Eliot Society for nearly ten years, and in 2004 received the society's Fathman Young Scholars Award. In 2009, a conference he organized at St Andrews (T S Eliot’s Visions and Revisions) gathered 50 attendees from three continents and included both that year’s Warton Lecture and a keynote by the editor of Eliot’s letters.
His thesis is entitled ‘T S Eliot among the Metaphysicals’, and it explores Eliot’s conflicted, evolving relationship with the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Eliot’s role in the revival of Metaphysical poetry, for instance, has long been misunderstood. Prominent articles such as ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ have been divorced from critical context while the more monumental Clark lectures have been under-read and under-studied. A careful account of the relationship reveals this group of poets to be one of the most formative influences on Eliot’s early criticism and poetry, on his move toward conversion, and on his late worldview.
Will’s other research interests include the concepts of image and time in film, mashup and the digital humanities, literature after postmodernism, the nature of literary technique, and the relationship between literature and belief. Currently, he is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Clemson University, and he also works as Content Strategist for The Worthwhile Company, a web development firm in South Carolina.
Publications:
Articles
‘Mashup, Hypertext, and the future of The Waste Land’. Controversies in The Waste Land. Ed. Joe Moffett. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, forthcoming.
‘[Review of] T S Eliot by Colin MacCabe’. Forum for Modern Language Studies. (forthcoming).
‘[Review of] The International Reception of T S Eliot, ed. Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagchee’. Forum for Modern Language Studies. (forthcoming).
‘Eliot Summer School Calls It a Beginning’. Time Present. (Summer 2009) 1, 8.
‘Foreword’. The Red Wheelbarrow. 18 (2009).
‘[Review of] Black Moon by Matthew Sweeney’. The Red Wheelbarrow. 17 (2008).
‘From Jack Donne to George Herbert: Eliot and “The End of the Journey”’. T. S. Eliot Society Newsletter. 54 (Autumn 2004) 11.
‘Satire, Sensibility and “Mutual Commerce”: Alexander Pope and The Waste Land’. T. S. Eliot Society Newsletter. 51 (Autumn 2003) 9-10.
Conference Papers
‘Eliot’s Critical Method: Thief by Night, Scientist by Day’. T. S. Eliot’s Visions and Revisions. University of St Andrews, October 2009.
‘T S Eliot, George Herbert and “The Road of Humility”’. George Herbert’s Travels. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, October 2008.
Respondent to papers by John Xiros Cooper, Paul Douglass and Patrick Query. T. S. Eliot, Dante and the European Tradition. Firenze, January 2008.
‘From Jack Donne to George Herbert: T S Eliot and “The End of the Journey”’. T. S. Eliot Society Annual Meeting. London, June 2004.
‘Satire, Sensibility and “Mutual Commerce”: Alexander Pope and The Waste Land’. T. S. Eliot Society Annual Meeting. St Louis, September 2002.
