Timothy  Sutton
Interim Chair, Professor of English, Writing Center Director
Howard College of Arts and Sciences
World Languages and Cultures, English
214 Russell Hall
tsutton@samford.edu
205-726-4226

Timothy Sutton earned his BA in English and Secondary Education at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 2001. He received his PhD in English from the University of Miami in 2007. 

Sutton was the instructor of English at Auburn University and assistant professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU). At FGCU, he was Coordinator of the M.A. Program in English.  He was hired at Samford University to be the director of Core Writing, which he led for six years. He now serves as interim chair and professor of World Languages and Cultures. Sutton is also the Director of the Writing Center and oversees the Writing Studio, an extension of the STEM Scholars, a program underwritten by a major National Science Foundation grant.

Sutton’s first book, Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists (University of Delaware Press 2010), discusses the influence of Catholic thought on English modernism and examines the work of Catholic converts who shaped the aesthetics and politics of the modernist period. He is now working on a project that analyzes the Aristotelian foundations of modernist approaches to and depictions of leisure. It is tentatively titled: Modernists at Rest: Leisure and the English Novel, 1900-1950

While at Miami, Dr. Sutton was the Managing Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement. He has also helped coordinate two International Miami James Joyce Birthday Conferences. He has a keen interest in Irish history and literature, and has given public lectures on Irish history and the Irish revolution.

In his spare time, Dr. Sutton likes to cycle, play tennis, and discuss Catholic theology. He also has six nieces and two nephews in Chicago, in addition to eight godchildren scattered across the U.S. and England.

Degrees and Certifications

  • PhD, English, University of Miami
  • BA, English and Secondary Education, DePauw University

Books

Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists (University of Delaware Press, 2010)
This manuscript, based on my dissertation, discusses the influence of Catholic thought on English modernism and examines the work of Catholic converts who shaped the aesthetics and politics of the modernist period. Chapters focus on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene.

Chapters & Essays

  • “Orthodoxy Revisited: the Postsecular Classroom.” Journal of Beliefs and Values. 2017 (38.3): 1-14. 
  • “‘Caught Happy in a World of Misery’: Art and Aristotelian Leisure in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” (June 2015, JMMLA 47.2)
  • “Tory Papism and The Good Soldier,” F. M. Ford’s The Good Soldier, ed. Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill - Rodopi, 2017.
  • “England’s ‘Race Suicide’ and the Eugenic Apocalypse of Teilhard de Chardin,” Apocalypse: Imagining the End, Hernandez, Allannah ed. (Oxford University E-Book).
  • “Eugenics: the Teilhardan Approach,” Bionoosfera (ed., Fabio Montovani, President of the European Teilhard Center), 2011.
  • “Tenth Time’s the Charm” The Chronicle of Higher Education 2 May 2010 Print. *Published under the pseudonym “Thomas Cranly”

Public Lectures

  • Spring 2016, “The Easter 1916 Uprising: From Folly to Freedom” (Naples St. Patrick’s Society)
  • Spring 2014, Debate Moderator, “Catholicism, Sexual Teaching, and Freedom: Dr. Peter Kreeft & Dr. Glenn Whitehouse (FGCU Dean of Students & CSO)
  • Fall 2013, Catholicism & the Public University (Guest Lecture, Diocese of Venice)