M. Tyler Sasser
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Tyler has completed his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Southern Mississippi, and will graduate in May 2015. His research focuses on literary representations of the pre-adolescent child in British literature and the changes and consistencies of such representations across time and genre. Primarily, though, he is interested in depictions of boys and boyhoods in English drama. His project investigates the uniqueness of these characters by exploring Shakespeare’s diverse ways of using them to negotiate, critique, and reject early modern ideals of manhood and how a similar phenomenon occurs when contemporary authors appropriate Shakespeare for boy readers.
Tyler’s academic and teaching interests include early British literature, drama, childhood studies (including children's literature), composition, rhetoric, professional writing, Tennessee Williams, film, and the Bible as literature. Whenever possible, he enjoys reading, teaching, and discussing Restoration drama and the eighteenth century, South American literature, Harlem Renaissance poetry, Dante, African-American children's/YA literature, Jane Austen, Walker Percy, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, David Lynch, and Woody Allen.
Other interests: backpacking, traveling in Europe and South America, walking his basset hound, and attempting to play Delta blues music on the guitar and dulcimer.