Grady Ballenger

Biography

A native of South Carolina, Grady Ballenger was drawn by a love of literature to the English and creative writing programs at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergraduate study. After a year of service as a VISTA volunteer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he earned a master's in English at Columbia University, his senior thesis concerning T.S. Eliot and the seventeenth-century. Ballenger returned to the University of North Carolina to teach literature and film and to complete a dissertation on James Thurber and the development of a distinctive style for humor in The New Yorker. Ballenger then worked in Louisiana, where he helped to develop the state's residential honors high school for 11th and 12th graders as well as a public liberals arts honors college, the Louisiana Scholars' College. Ballenger came to Stetson to serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and now has happily returned to teaching literature and film. He currently serves as president of Stetson's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and also as faculty advisor to the English department's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international honor society in language and literature.

Research Interest

American literature, Liberal arts education for the twenty-first century, Research relevant to courses, especially Native American studies and the intersectionsbetween literature and medicine.