Stacey Peebles

BIOGRAPHY 

Stacey Peebles came to Centre in 2011. She is an associate professor and chair of English and director of the Film Studies program and was named a Centre Scholar in 2014. She holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to Centre, she was the assistant director of Lloyd International Honors College at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and also worked as a professor and administrator in the Honors College of The University of Houston. Her research areas include the representation of war and violence, film adaptation, Westerns, and contemporary American author Cormac McCarthy. 

Her most recent monograph, The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy (U of South Carolina P, 2024) addresses the post-2011 surge of war stories in both America and Iraq, including novels, memoir, poetry, and both realistic war cinema as well as superhero and Star Wars films. The book continues the work of her first monograph, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq (Cornell UP, 2011). She is also the author of Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (U of Texas P, 2017), which explores McCarthy's work in theater, screenplays, and film adaptations by others. She is editor of the collection Violence in Literature (Salem P, 2014), and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy (MLA P, 2021). She is currently at work on a history of the critical reception of Cormac McCarthy, under contract with Camden House Press for their series Literary Criticism in Perspective. 

Peebles has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal (Penn State UP) since 2010 and is President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. In 2017, she co-edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies called “Enduring Operations: The Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” (Johns Hopkins UP). Recent essay publications have addressed female military leadership in Star Wars films (in Contemporary American Science Fiction Film, 2022), the field of contemporary war representation (in War and American Literature, 2021), and justice in Western films (in The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West). At Centre, Peebles teaches courses in film and American literature.

To read an interview with Dr. Peebles about “The Five Best Cormac McCarthy Books” with the website Five Books, click here.

To listen to Dr. Peebles speak about Blood Meridian on the Reading McCarthy podcast, click here. 

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS /MEMBERSHIPS 

• Editor, The Cormac McCarthy Journal 
• President, The Cormac McCarthy Societ
  

COURSES TAUGHT 

• Introduction to Film
• Global Cinema 
• Silence and Sound in Film 
• The Western: Imagining Identity 
• Cormac McCarthy 
• War Stories
• The Idea of the Super Human
• Contemporary American Literature

US PUBLICATIONS

Books:

• The War Comes with You: Enduring War in Life, Fiction, and Fantasy. U of South Carolina P, 2024.
• Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy. 
  Co-edited with Benjamin West. MLA P, 2021.
• Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen. University of Texas P, 2017.
  Violence and Literature. Salem P, 2014. 
• Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq. Cornell UP, 2011. 

Selected Book Chapters

• Bond in the New World Orders: License to Kill (1989). James Bond Will Return: Critical Perspectives on the 007 Film Franchise, ed. Claire Hines, Terence McSweeney, and Stuart Joy. Wallflower P, 2024.
• Gatelamps to Another World: Seeing the Animal Other in Cormac McCarthy. Animals in the Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great American Fiction. Ed. John Gruesser. Texas A&M UP, Integrative Natural History Series, 2022. 
• 21st-Century Star Wars: Profiles in (Female) Courage. Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Stuart Joy and Terence McSweeney, Routledge, 2022. 
• The Forever Wars.War and American Literature. Ed. Jennifer Haytock. Cambridge UP, 2021. 
• Cormac McCarthy: A Critical History. Cormac McCarthy in Context.  Ed. Steven Frye. Cambridge UP, 2020. 
• The Western and Film: What's "Deserve" Got to Do with It? The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West.  Ed. Steven Frye.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.  
• Lenses into War: Digital Verite in Iraq War Films.The Philosophy of War Films.  Ed. David LaRocca.  Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014.