Professor Taylor Hagood teaches American literature, with specialization in the writing of William Faulkner, African American literature, disability studies, thing studies, and the literature and culture of the United States South. Increasingly, he is exploring comparative approaches that span disciplines, such as ecocriticism, animal studies, and the Anthropocene, in an effort to theorize rurality in literature, history, public policy, and other dimensions of culture.

Professor Hagood's books include Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth (2008); Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers (2010); Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha’s Architect (2017); and Faulkner: Writer of Disability (2014), winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Literary Studies. Along with these monographs, he edited Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (2014) and coedited Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (2015) with Eric Gary Anderson and Daniel Cross Turner and Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies (2020), with Kirstin L. Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, and Anthony Wilson. 

Currently, Professor Hagood is expanding and diversifying both as a scholar and as a public intellectual. His forthcoming book, Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend, is a biography/true crime that tells the story of Grand Ole Opry banjo player, singer, and comedian, David “Stringbean” Akeman, whose brutal murder in 1973 rocked Nashville and the country music industry. Concurrently, Professor Hagood is writing an interdisciplinary theory/philosophy/history of rurality across time and space. As a lecturer for general audiences, he is in demand across south Florida and the country on topics in literature, art, music, culture, and history.

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