Kevin Binfield
Professor of English and Humanities
I attended Nebraska Wesleyan University (BA with High Distinction, 1984) and the University of Nebraska (MA, 1987; PhD, 1993). My doctoral dissertation was on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his place in the rhetorical context of British radicalism. I stood examination in the following areas -- Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, Plains Literature, Native American Literature, Renaissance Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, and American Literature to 1900. I also won several teaching awards. Although I did my graduate work during the golden age of literary theory, I managed, through the guidance of Stephen Behrendt, Paul Olson, Robert Stock, and Kate Ronald to remain skeptical of theory and never to allow theory to replace interpretations based on textual realities and informed by an ethical sense. Even today, I consider myself a student of Professor Behrendt and combine rhetorical analysis with close reading and historical research.
My first academic job was in the Department of English at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina in 1993. The on-campus interview comprised one day of meeting with faculty and administrators, an afternoon of rescuing an injured cat, and two days of hiking with the department chair and her husband in the Blue Ridge. The joys of working at Gardner-Webb centered on a small, closely-bound community of left-wingers at the school and that community's love of vegetarian food, wine, activism, and the mountains.
I came to Murray State in 1997 (after an on-campus interview that included no hiking but, rather, three evenings of dining and drinking), was tenured in 2000, and was glad to give up what was left of my diplomatic facade. At Murray, my scholarship came to focus exclusively on laboring-class writers, and my teaching encompassed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, literary theory, and research and bibliography. Murray affords some flexibility in teaching, so I developed and taught a course titled "Peace, War, and Culture"--a course that I hoped would counteract the world's rush to violence. The course did not succeed in keeping the United States out of Iraq, but it contributed in no small part to keeping peace between Canada and Sweden.
In 2004, I got my dream job as the Byron Lecturer at the University of Nottingham. I loved living in the small market town of Bingham, drinking at the Horse and Plough, shopping at the Colston Bassett Store, and writing my lectures in The Crown overlooking the market square (please pardon the shameless adverts for a very pleasant town); however, I missed the collegiality, open doors, and intellectual liveliness of American universities, so I resigned my post and returned to Murray State in 2005, at which time my partner and I bought a farm. In 2006, Murray State promoted me to Professor and in 2008 gave me the Board of Regents Award for Teaching Excellence. The high point of my career occurred during the summer of 2006 when my British Literature students gave to me on the last day of class a bottle of 1979 Bunnahabhain (whisky).