Dr. Trent Brown

PROFESSOR 

Dr. Trent Brown, Professor of American Studies, Department of English and Technical Communication, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Dr. Brown is professor of American Studies. His research focuses on the cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, particularly race and gender in the recent South.

He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in history from the University of Iowa, an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. with majors in history and English from the University of Mississippi. Before coming to Missouri S&T, Brown was assistant professor of history at James Madison University, where he taught the history of the 20th-century South and the recent United States.

Brown is the author or editor of six published books:

  • White Masculinity in the Recent South (Louisiana State University Press, 2008)
  • One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890-1920 (University of Tennessee Press, 2010)
  • Ed King’s Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer (University Press of Mississippi, 2014)
  • Sex and Sexuality in Modern Southern Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2017)
  • Murder in McComb: The Tina Andrews Case (Louisiana State University Press, 2020)
  • Roadhouse Justice: Hattie Lee Barnes and the Killing of a White Man in 1950s Mississippi (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).

Brown is currently writing a book about a 1986 murder in Oxford, Mississippi.

His other publications include:

  • "What Makes a 'Newcomb Girl'?: Student Ideals in the Progressive Era." In Susan Tucker and Beth Willinger, ed., Newcomb College, 1886- 2006: Higher Education of Women in New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012: 80-96.
  • "'Mississippi's Giant House Party': Being White at the Neshoba County Fair." Southern Cultures 8 (Summer, 2002): 38-55.
  • Foreword, Men Working, by John Faulkner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. vii-xxv.

Brown is the editor of the series Civil Rights in Mississippi, published by the University Press of Mississippi. The first title in the series, Hodding Carter Jr.'s So the Heffners Left McComb, was published in 2016. Brown also edits the series Southern True Crime, published by Louisiana State University Press.

Brown was a contributing editor for the Mississippi Encyclopedia and wrote for that publication as well as the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. At Missouri S&T, he teaches the American literature survey and upper-division courses on American film and on the culture and literature of the American South.