Tuesday Talks

Before retiring in 2022, Deno Trakas was the Laura and Winston Hoy Professor of American Literature and Chair of the English Department at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He taught literature, including a course on Fitzgerald and Hemingway, composition and creative writing and served as the director of the writing center. He’s the author of the novel Messenger from Mystery, the memoir Because Memory Isn’t Eternal: A Story of Greeks in Upstate South Carolina as well as two chapbooks of poetry, The Shuffle of Wings and human & puny. He has also published fiction and poetry in anthologies and magazines such as The Denver Quarterly, Oxford America and Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek American Poetry. He’s won five South Carolina Fiction Project Prizes and a South Carolina Individual Artist Grant. He ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. In retirement he teaches American novels (including The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms) in the Lifelong Learning Program at Wofford College and spends his time reading, writing, playing tennis, playing with his indefatigable grandchildren and walking his Doberman who thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood.

Timothy Helwig is Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century and working-class American literature. His book Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature, which examines formal and thematic connections between sensational fiction and African American literature of the 1840s and 1850s, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2020. His scholarly articles have appeared in American Studies, American Periodicals and Cambridge University Press’s A History of American Crime Fiction and Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. He has held visiting research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and he has been teaching Poe’s stories, poems and lone novel since he started graduate school in 1995.

Marian Strobel is the William Montgomery Professor of History Emeritus at Furman University, where she continues to teach. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and earned her PhD from Duke University. Her achievements include being named a Southern Conference Faculty Member of the Year as well as earning the Meritorious Teaching Award, the Maiden Invitation Award and the James Smart Award for vocational reflection. She is a former Chair

of the History Department at Furman as well as former Chair of the Faculty. She specializes in

Recent US History, Modern European History, African-American History and American women’s history.

John Brian Eleazer is a native South Carolinian and a direct descendant of Captain Henry Felder, the protagonist in the book he authored, The South Carolina Militia and the Revolutionary War. For fifteen years, Brian researched and wrote about Henry Felder, originally for his family’s consumption and later expanded to capture the uniqueness of the South Carolina colony and emergence of the South Carolina militia -- a story somewhat different than that of the other twelve colonies. Additionally, Brian has written several short stories for his children and grandchildren. He is a retired Air Force officer and holds degrees from Clemson University and Auburn University.

Tammy Pike is a Senior Instructor of History at USC Upstate. She graduated from the University of South Carolina Upstate with a B.A. in History and earned a Master's Degree in History from the University of South Carolina. Her fields of interest include Nazi Germany, Eugenics, Oral History and Women's History. She has taught various courses at USC Upstate including World History, Gender, Disability, and Eugenics: US and Germany, Nazi Germany, Women in Europe since 1789, Women in the U.S. Since 1865, Women and World War II and Unruly Women in the US. Many of her courses include an experimental component such as service-learning, community engagement and/or civic engagement projects. Her Women in World War II, Women in the U.S. since 1865 and Unruly Women courses all produced separate digital archives, or LibGuides, created by the students. Oral history projects and the digitization of documents related to women in the U.S., particularly the Upstate of South Carolina, have become a major component of her pedagogical contribution to archives such as the Piedmont Historical Preservation Society and USC Upstate. She is the Internship Coordinator for History at Upstate, and she usually oversees between two and eight interns each

semester in the Upstate community, actively contributing to history.

Margaret (Peggy) Pickett is an independent researcher, author and living history presenter. In addition to developing and presenting history programs for schools, she has researched and created programs in which she portrays women of the past. Her current portrayals include Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Dorothy Sinkler Richardson and Rebecca Motte. She is the co-author of The European Struggle to Settle North America 1521 – 1608 and the author of Eliza Lucas Pinckney Colonial Plantation Manager and Mother of American Patriots, 1722 – 1793. Her latest book Rebecca Brewton Motte American Patriot and Successful Rice Planter, 1737 – 1815 was published in 2022.