College of Charleston Associate Professor Scott Poole’s 2011 book Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting continues to draw national attention. The Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) has selected the work for the 2012 John W. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer published in 2011. The award will be presented at the PCA/ACA Conference in Boston on Friday, April 13, 2012.
Poole’s sixth manuscript is an American horror historical study that explores America’s fascination with monsters. The book examines how these narratives have intersected with topics in American history ranging from race to gender and sexuality. Poole has blended distinctive newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films and oral histories together to create this engrossing narrative.
“Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche,” Scott Poole explains, “But are concoctions of the pubic imagination—reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events.”
Poole holds a Ph.D in American history from the University of Mississippi. He is also the author of Satan in America: The Devil We Know, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina, Never Surrender, South Carolina’s Civil War, and Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction.
For more information, contact Scott Poole at poolews@cofc.edu.
