Caroline Brandon, a Mississippi State University graduate student, has been selected as the 2018 Eudora Welty Fellow, sponsored by the Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). Brandon will use her stipend during July to work in the Welty Collection at MDAH, examining the portrayal of women in relation to societal expectations. She will focus on Welty’s revisions to stories in her first book of short stories, A Curtain of Green, to determine how Welty changed her characters in subsequent drafts.
Brandon taught English and French at Germantown High School in Madison, Mississippi, after graduating from Millsaps College cum laude with a B. A. in English literature in 2015. During college, she was a Ford Fellow and worked extensively with Welty biographer and scholar Suzanne Marrs. She credits Marrs with being the most influential person in her career.
She received the Robert H. Padgett English Award at Millsaps and is the recipient of a Howell H. and Elizabeth S. Gwin Endowed Scholarship at Mississippi State. This fall Brandon will continue to work as a graduate teaching assistant and help with the Mississippi Quarterly, the Journal of Southern Cultures, published by Mississippi State’s College of Arts and Sciences..
Brandon expects to use her research in her thesis for her M. A. and will begin applying to graduate programs to pursue her doctoral degree with a career of teaching at the university level in mind.