Kary Smout Associate Professor of English

Kary Smout

Washington 112
540-458-8979
smoutk@wlu.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Education

B.A., Brigham Young University, summa cum laude with University Honors

     National Merit Scholar

     Spencer W. Kimball Scholar

     U.S. Presidential Scholar from Idaho

M.A., Duke University

Ph.D., Duke University

Research

Language and Culture; Writing Instruction; the Politics of Higher Education; Native American Literature; Literature of the American South; Literature of the American West; Postmodern Fiction, Popular Culture, The Arts, Mormon Studies

Teaching

First Year Writing Seminar (ESOL)

Literature of the American South

Literature of the American West

Business in American Literature

Postmodern Fiction 

Cormac McCarthy

Wallace Stegner

Environmental Persuasion

English Major Gateway Seminar

English Major Capstone Class

Selected Publications

Book Review of Michael P. Grave's Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric.   Studies in American Culture 34.1 (October 2011): 168-169.

'Who Cares About Writing?  Lessons from the BP Oil Spill.'   (Renamed by the Editors "BP Disaster Reveals Writing Deficits.")  Op-ed.  Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch.  27 July 2010   

"Don't Tread on Me: Crossing Boundaries in the Liberal Arts." Composition(s) In the New Liberal Arts. Eds. Joanna Castner Post and James A. Inman. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. 29-42.

Book Review of Brian Greene's The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006.   Shenandoah:  The Washington and Lee University Review 57.2 (Fall 2007): 192-196.

Book Review of Ronald L. Numbers's Darwinism Comes to America.   Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 90 (1999): 825-826.

Book. The Creation/Evolution Controversy: a Battle for Cultural Power. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

"An Interview with Charles Bazerman." Composition Studies 23 (1995): 21-36. (Co-authored with T. Hugh Crawford.)

"Attacking (Southern) Creationists." Religion in the Contemporary South: Diversity, Community, and Identity. Eds. O. Kendall White, Jr. and Daryl White. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, No. 28. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. 59-66.

"Apolitical Linguistics?"  Book Review of Frederick J. Newmeyer's The Politics of Linguistics.   American Speech 65 (1990) 275-284.  

"Senkyoshigo: A Missionary English of Japan." American Speech 63 (1988): 137-49.

University Leadership

Founder and Coordinator.  Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Program (now the Writing Program).  1991-2010.   

Founder and Director.   Writing Center.   1991-2019.