A Professor of English, Will Brantley teaches courses in modern American and southern literature, film studies, and professional writing. Mr. Brantley received MTSU’s Outstanding Honors Faculty Award in 2005 and has been active in developing the university’s Ph.D. program in English and in directing many of its dissertations.

An M.A. student at Georgia State University in the late 1970s, Mr. Brantley directed the school’s student film program—the forerunner of CinéFest—as it became one of Atlanta’s premier venues for art and foreign films. He held the Brittain Fellowship in Writing at the Georgia Institute of Technology while completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (1991).

Mr. Brantley’s publications include Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir (1993), which was awarded the Eudora Welty Prize for an interpretive work of scholarship in modern letters. He is the editor of Conversations with Pauline Kael (1996)—a collection of interviews with the New Yorker’s legendary film critic—and a 50th anniversary edition of Lillian Smith’s Now Is the Time (2004), a book designed to help white southerners of the midcentury accept the Brown ruling to desegregate the public schools.

Much of Mr. Brantley’s recent scholarship has focused on letters by Southern women writers, with essays in The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the U.S. South (2016) and the Modern language Association’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O’Connor (2019). In addition, he is the co-editor of Conversations with Edmund White (2017) and editor of Conversations with Sarah Schulman (2024), two pivotal writers in the LGBTQ+ community.

Mr. Brantley’s articles and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, the Southern Quarterly, and in other well-known journals. He is a charter member of the Carson McCullers Society, which he co-founded to promote critical appreciation of the iconoclastic Georgia author. He has worked with other author societies and has been elected as a regional delegate to the Modern Language Association.

Mr. Brantley is active in community affairs, having served for many years as president of his homeowners’ association in Nashville.  

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