Biography
A native of the US South, my degrees are from Florida State University (BA in Classics and English, summa cum laude, 1978) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MA and PhD in English, 1981 and 1986).
My first academic position was as Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University in Marion (1986-89), after which I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where I served as Assistant, Associate, and then Full Professor in English and Women's Studies at Georgia State University (1989-2010).
In 2010, I moved to Ireland to take up the post of Glucksman Professor in Contemporary Writing in English at UL. From January to June 2015, I served as an Adjunct Visiting Professor at the Université de Lille 3, Lille, France.
I've served as the Director of the Yeats International Summer School and the President of the International Yeats Society.
In addition to my passion for literature and language, I have abiding interests in classical and traditional music.
Research Interests
My research focuses on modern and contemporary Irish, US, and world literature in English, especially poetry. I am a specialist on W. B. Yeats, especially his occult life and work.
My book The Aristocracy of Art looks at the rhetoric of autobiographical fiction and its relationship to the issue of class in James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe. Wisdom of Two, my second book, analyses the spiritual and literary collaboration of W. B. and his wife George (Hyde Lees), especially their experiments with automatic writing. I have also been part of teams that have produced scholarly editions of the Yeatses' automatic writing and other occult experiments (Yeats's 'Vision' Papers) and the two versions of Yeats's book of esoteric philosophy, A Vision (1925 and 1937).
I write about literature from a perspective shaped by a love for and questioning of form. I'm interested in the relation between abstract form and felt experience, and I have an abiding interest in what escapes the patterns humans make in the world. Besides Irish literature, I also have particular interests in the literature of the US South, women's writing, and the relation between poetry and music.
I have served as Director of the Yeats International Summer School (2013-15) and as President of the International Yeats Society (2013-17).
Teaching Interests
I believe that good teaching is opening a space in which learning can occur. It requires listening as well as talking, stillness and silence as well as activity and communication. Although I talk a lot in the classroom, my goal is not necessarily to insert myself into the teaching and learning space but to notice what is needed and provide that.
I'm also of the opinion that teachers are obsolete as sources of knowledge. In the digital age, teachers are guides through thickets of information rather than yet another source of raw data. As a teacher of literature and writing, I am most valuable when I can show how important these things are to thinking deeply and well. I'm convinced that society and the individual people in it rarely thrive when such thinking is rare.
My courses are mostly in the areas of poetry and modern/contemporary literature in English, but basically I am fascinated by language and its arrangement into art, in literary and theoretical texts that range widely in the times and spaces of their composition.
Publications
Book
A Vision (1937), Volume 14 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats
Harper Margaret Mills and Catherine Paul
A Vision (1925), Volume 13 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats
Harper Margaret Mills and Catherine Paul
Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats's 'Vision' Papers, Volume 4
Harper Margaret Mills, Harper George Mills
The Aristocracy of Art: James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe
Harper Margaret Mills
Book Chapter
The clock has run down and must be wound up again': A Vision in Time
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats and Afterwords
Reflected Voices, Double Visions
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats's A Vision: Explications and Contexts
The Real Thing': Ní Chuilleanáin and Mattering Bodies
Harper Margaret Mills
Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives
George Yeats
Harper Margaret Mills
W. B. Yeats in Context
Yeats and the Occult
Harper Margaret Mills
The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats
Our Lives with Yeats's Ghosts: The Writing and the Editing of the Automatic Script
Harper Margaret Mills, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies
Celestial Bodies: Sexual Cosmologies and a Collaborative Vision
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats Annual
Yeats's Religion
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies
Sisters, Outsiders, Histories: First Principles and Last Things in Boland and Lorde
Harper Margaret Mills
Representing Ireland
Fabric and Fame in the Odyssey and Penelope'
Harper Margaret Mills
Gender in Joyce
Bread and Wine, Coke and Peanuts: Teaching Sacramental Feasts
Harper Margaret Mills
Pedagogy, Praxis, Ulysses
Twilight to Vision: Yeats's Collaborative Modernity
Harper Margaret Mills
Irishness and (Post)Modernism
Taken in Drapery': Dressing the Narrative in the Odyssey and Penelope'
Harper Margaret Mills
Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on 'Penelope' and Cultural Studies
The Message is the Medium: Identity in the Automatic Script
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies
The Medium as Creator: George Yeats's Role in the Automatic Script
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies
Versions of History and Brother to Dragons
Harper Margaret Mills
Robert Penn Warren's 'Brother to Dragons': A Discussion
Other Journal
Of Time and the River: The Problem of Authority
Harper Margaret Mills
The Thomas Wolfe Review
Other Publication
Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back, by John Gordon
Harper Margaret Mills
Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce, by R. J. Schork
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats's Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination, by David Pierce
Harper Margaret Mills
James Joyce Literary Supplement
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 3 (19011904), ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard
Harper Margaret Mills
Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XII: John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran, and Volume VI: Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O'Donnell
Harper Margaret Mills
Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship
Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry, by Elizabeth Butler Cullingford
Harper Margaret Mills
English Literature in Transition: 18801920
The Girl Image as Subtext in James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' by Klára Weiss-Balla
Harper Margaret Mills
James Joyce Literary Supplement
Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, by Suzanne Nalbantian
Harper Margaret Mills
James Joyce Literary Supplement
Yeats and Artistic Power, by Phillip L. Marcus
Harper Margaret Mills
English Literature in Transition: 18801920
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XII: John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran
Harper Margaret Mills
Studies in Short FIction
Yeats and Postmodernism, ed. Leonard Orr
Harper Margaret Mills
Christianity and Literature
Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, by Wayne K. Chapman
Harper Margaret Mills
South Carolina Review
All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Marguerite Duras, by Karen Kaivola
Harper Margaret Mills
Christianity and Literature
Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History, by Thomas R. Whitaker
Harper Margaret Mills
Christianity and Literature
Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct, by Judith Wilt
Harper Margaret Mills
Christianity and Literature
Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers
Harper Margaret Mills and Timothy J. McNiven
Journal of Arts Education
Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe, by David Herbert Donald
Harper Margaret Mills
Southern Literary Journa
Peer Reviewed Journal
a form created by passion to unite us to ourselves': The Masks of Pizzorno and Yeats
Harper Margaret Mills
International Political Anthropology
Flesh and Bones: Anne Enright's The Gathering
Harper Margaret Mills
South Carolina Review
'how else could the god have come to us'?: Yeatsian Masks, Modernity, and the Sacred
Harper Margaret Mills
Nordic Irish Studies
An Interview with Michael Longley
Harper Margaret Mills and Michael Longley
Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art
Interview with Michael Longley
Harper Margaret Mills
Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art
Nemo: George Yeats and Her Automatic Script
Harper Margaret Mills
New Literary History
An Interview with Eavan Boland
Harper Margaret Mills and Eavan Boland
Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art
The Authoritative Image: Yeats's Singing School
Harper Margaret Mills
Studies in the Literary Imagination