Summer Institute Faculty

Dr. Shannon Flynt

Dr. Flynt returned to her Alma Mater in 2000 after a distinguished graduate research and teaching career in anthropology, classical archaeology and ancient studies. She currently serves as the university's Fulbright Program Advisor, teaches courses in Art History I, II, and III, the University Fellows series, the Classics Department's Rediscovery of the Classical World, Senior Capstone and international study in Rome.  After earning her Master's degree in Anthropology at the University of Alabama, where she demonstrated exceptional aptitude in Latin and field archaeology, Dr. Flynt entered the doctoral program in Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri, where she earned a Huggins Fellowship and the Donald K. Anderson Graduate Student Teaching Award. In 1999 Dr. Flynt was named a U.S. Fulbright Fellow to Austria, where she lived for a year while completing research for her doctoral dissertation, "The Military Vici of Noricum". In addition to excavation at the Roman military site of Lauriacum in Austria she has served on excavation teams at Pompeii, Castell Henllys (Wales) and Clonmacnoise (Ireland). Closer to home, she has excavated at Alabama's Dust Cave and Moundville Native American sites and at the historic Hickman House in central Missouri. She maintains her research interests in the Roman army and Roman frontier in Europe and is an active member of the Archaeological Institute of America, European Archaeological Association and Classical Association of the Middle West and South.  Dr. Flynt and husband Sean, also at Samford, became the parents of Ambrose Doss Flynt on August 30, 2007. 

Dr. Bryan Johnson

Dr. Bryan Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Samford University, where he has taught since 1995 after graduating from the creative writing program at the University of Denver. While Dr. Johnson is a specialist in creative writing (poetry) and literary theory, he has also taught courses in 20th-century poetry, film, comparative literature, and the philosophy and literature of science. In the University Fellows program, Dr. Johnson teaches Writing and Rhetoric and The Western Intellectual Tradition. Central to Dr. Johnson’s teaching is the way that other disciplines intersect with writing and reading literature, in particular film and science. He pioneered a course that uses film to help teach students how to write poems, and he is always looking for ways to integrate science into the literature classroom.  Dr. Johnson is an active, publishing scholar-poet, with work in international journals like the Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Free Verse, Thicket, New American Writing, and in an anthology of work on Emmett Till. He was a semi-finalist for the national Walt Whitman Award for his collection of poems entitled See and a finalist for the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His scholarship on teaching creative writing was awarded the James Woodall Award for Pedagogical Scholarship. Since collaborating with faculty at the University of Maastricht on a Problem-Based Learning Transatlantic Cooperation Grant, Dr. Johnson has lectured on the craft of teaching poetry in Denmark, at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and all over the United States. Teaching and learning abroad has been essential to Dr. Johnson’s continuing education. He has served twice as professor-in-residence at Samford’s Daniel House in London, and he was a visiting professor at China’s Anhui Normal University where he lectured on American literature.

Dr. Christopher Metress

Chris Metress is Professor of English and Director of the University Fellows Program. After receiving his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt, he taught for three years at Wake Forest University before coming to Samford in 1993. In the English Department, he teaches courses in American literature, film noir, and southern literature, and he frequently offers courses on British Literature at Samford's Daniel House in London, where he was professor-in-residence in the Fall of 1997. From 2003 to 2006, he directed Samford's participation in a national curricular project designed to promote innovative teaching of the liberal arts, a project which helped to seed the development of the University Fellows Program.

Dr. Metress’ essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Review, African-American Review and Studies in the Novel, and he has contributed to a number of scholarly collections. He has published three books: The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett (Greenwood, 1995), The Lynching of Emmett Till (Virginia, 2002), and Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (LSU, 2007). The Lynching of Emmett Till was a university press bestseller and was featured in news stories in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Nation magazine, as well as on ABC World News Tonight and PBS. In 2003, the Association of American University Presses named The Lynching of Emmett Till among its "Best Books For Understanding Race Relations in the U.S.," and the collection has been used in courses in more than 100 colleges and universities.

Dr. Metress has also served as the university’s NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative since 1997.