Dr. Bob Donahoo,
Department of English
Dr. Robert Donahoo, Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, was recently awarded a prestigious grant of nearly $200,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant award funded the NEH Summer Institute “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” held in July of 2014 at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia, the hometown of renowned author Flannery O’Connor.
Dr. Donahoo attended the first NEH Institute on Flannery O’Connor, directed by Dr. Bruce Gentry, during the summer of 2007. Dr. Donahoo thought that the immersion in O’Connor’s life and works the Institute offered created a “volcanic” experience for its participants. Dr. Donahoo feels that he “grew by leaps and bounds” as an Institute participant. Accordingly, Dr. Donahoo did not hesitate to say yes when Dr. Gentry invited him to co-direct a second NEH Summer Institute on Flannery O’Connor.
According to Dr. Donahoo, writing the grant proposal was the most time-consuming and arduous portion of the entire NEH Summer Institute experience. The hard work of Dr. Donahoo and Dr. Gentry paid off, however, when the two were awarded $194,000. Dr. Charles Bridges, Interim Department Chair and Professor of English, explains that “by science standards, this isn’t a big grant, but by humanities standards it is. More than this, Bob’s having been awarded the grant speaks of his standing as a Flannery O’Connor of national stature.”
Once Dr. Donahoo was awarded the funds, his first step in planning the institute was to find faculty to teach the seminar. After recruiting all faculty members, Dr. Donahoo’s next step was to recruit participants. Dr. Donahoo and Dr. Gentry received 76 complete applications, more than doubling the 30 applications received for the 2007 Institute. To narrow down the applicant pool, Dr. Donahoo and Dr. Gentry considered the research project each applicant proposed to complete as part of their applications.
From the 76 applicants, Dr. Donahoo and Dr. Gentry selected 25 total participants. 22 of the 25 Institute participants were full-time faculty in institutions of higher education, ranging from community colleges to major research institutions. The participants came from many different academic disciplines. For example, one political science instructor attended the Institute because she was interested in using O’Connor’s works to teach the political process.
Dr. Donahoo explains that although there once seemed to be a trend of accepting O’Connor’s own adept spelling out of Catholic readings for her work, scholarship has added to this theological dimension by focusing on O’Connor’s interactions with history, the issues of race and gender central to her era, the effects of revelations concerning her disability and theories of literature itself.
At the Institute, Dr. Donahoo encouraged participants to explore new ways of examining O’Connor. For example, one participant, with a background in creative writing, had recently published an article on creative writing programs. Knowing that O’Connor was famous as an early graduate from a creative writing program at the University of Iowa, Dr. Donahoo encouraged the participant to reexamine O’Connor. After attending the Institute, the participant ended up writing an entire chapter on O’Connor featured in his book published in late 2015.
Similarly, the faculty invited to teach at the Institute, while all experts on O’Connor, represented a diversity of topics relating to O’Connor. According to Dr. Donahoo, seminar topics included O’Connor and: race, historical religion of time period, anthropological approaches, juvenilia/unfinished manuscripts, and biography. Dr. Donahoo believes that inviting faculty members with several specific and differing specialties concerning O’Connor ensures that the experience was fruitful for them, too—during the Institute, the participants, alongside the faculty, came to understand new ways of understanding O’Connor and her works.
While at the Institute, participants spent time in discussions and lectures and in private meetings with faculty members to discuss their individual research projects. The last week of the seminar, participants spent in the Special Collections at Georgia College working with O’Connor’s manuscripts. Additionally, Dr. Donahoo led 3 field trips during the seminar, taking participants to: 1) the house in Savannah in which O’Connor was born, 2) the Special Collections of Emery University in Atlanta, 3) the filming sites in Macon the movie adaptation of O’Connor’s first novel, Lives Blood.
Although Dr. Donahoo did not have the opportunity to teach participants during the seminar, he did meet individually with each participant to discuss their experience and their project. At the end of the Institute, each person was required to report on the progress they made on their project during their time at the seminar. Additionally, Institute participants are invited to present a paper, researched and partially written at the Institute, at Georgia College’s annual Flannery O’Connor Conference.
Above all, Dr. Donahoo wanted scholars to leave the O’Connor Institute with new ways of thinking. One way to ensure that participants continually developed new ways of thinking was to provide them with new, tangible resources. Accordingly, each participant left the seminar with approximately 10 books on O’Connor. Several of these books, such as a comprehensive bibliography of O’Connor’s work from the early 2000s, were donated by publishing houses.
Despite the seminar only lasting several weeks during the summer, directing the Institute is a 3 year process between applying for the grant, facilitating the Institute, and publishing the results—for Dr. Donahoo, this included spending his summer of 2015 editing a section of the O’Connor Review (Vol. XIII). A direct result of the Institute, this section includes a couple of papers from faculty and a poem and an essay from participants. Additionally, directing the Institute involves the life-long commitment to continue updating the seminar website with participant accomplishments.
Dr. Donahoo, who believes that an NEH summer seminar is a premier event to be invited to participate in, both as a faculty member and as a participant, explains that such an invitation constitutes the federal government investing in you, paying you to become a better scholar. According to Dr. Donahoo, upwards of 90% of people involved leave seminars changed. Believing that participation in an NEH summer institute is an incredible opportunity, Dr. Donahoo is interested in going for a third O’Connor-themed seminar, but this time as a faculty member, perfectly rounding out his experience.