Carol Mason

author of Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy

November 4, 2015

Carol Mason is director of Gender and Women's Studies and associate professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Mason's interdisciplinary scholarship on race, gender, sexuality and the rise of the right since the 1960s complements teaching interests in feminist pedagogy, critical theory and American culture. Her first book, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics was published by Cornell University Press in 2002 and funded in part by a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported her second book, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy, which arrived from Cornell in 2009. Mason's articles have appeared in Cultural Studies, National Women's Studies Association Journal, The Journal of Constitutional Law, Appalachian Journal, Hypatia and many edited collections.

"In this captivating book, the Kanawha County textbook war of 1974 becomes a pivotal saga in the rise of the New Right because of the longstanding national need to strip-mine the Appalachian region for its myths and moral lessons. Cutting through the liberal and conservatives discourses that have simultaneously romanticized and demonized the poor whites of Appalachia, Carol Mason convincingly portrays the textbook protests as a 'discursive crossroads' that cast West Virginia's working class as both backward and modern, as violent racists and innocent victims, and ultimately as Christian warriors battling to save the American soul." Matthew D. Lassiter, University of Michigan, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2010-honorees/carol-mason

Last Updated: 8 December 2015