MARIANN REGAN

Dr. Mariann Regan is a southerner who grew up in North and South Carolina.  It was not until midlife that she learned—from a cousin—that several of her ancestors had been white slaveholders, including two families of great-grandparents on her mother’s side: Kirvens and Frasers. Startled and curious, she determined to study her family’s past.

With a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a doctorate in English literature from Yale University, Dr. Regan began her forty-year teaching career as a professor of literature at Fairfield University in Connecticut. She is grateful for an Angier Biddle Duke scholarship to Duke, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Yale, and a sabbatical fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support a year of research leave from Fairfield University.

Her publications include Love Words (Cornell University Press), which is a psychological study of fin amor and Renaissance poetry, and the novel Immortality News (Creative Arts Books). She has published in the literary magazine Inkwell. She spoke in 2009 on the “Investigative Memoir” panel of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

She is grateful to professors William Blackburn at Duke University, Thomas Greene and Bart Giamatti at Yale University, and especially to her husband Richard Regan, an outstanding professor of Shakespeare and a compelling interpreter of human nature.