Farrell O’Gorman

Farrell O’Gorman is Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College and taught previously at Mississippi State University and DePaul University. He is the author of two monographs: Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction (2004) and Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination (2017). He has spoken on O’Connor at a variety of regional and national events, at conferences in France and Italy, and at the 2014 O’Connor conference in Ireland, for which he served on the organizing committee.

Institute Discussions

O’Gorman’s seminars will focus on O’Connor, Catholicism, and gender in the American Gothic, in part by exploring her relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Katherine Anne Porter. His public lecture will place O’Connor in a tradition of “American women writing Catholicism” that includes Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison as well as Dorothy Day and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.

Why O’Connor?

O’Connor connects so many seemingly disparate points in American culture. She studied European philosophy and theology but also entered into conversation with–and ultimately influenced–popular films and music. She is at once a highly distinctive regional writer and firmly at the center of a national literary conversation that stretches from Poe and Twain to Erdrich, McCarthy, and Morrison. How many fiction writers have done so much with so few words?