Everett Hamner earned his B.A. from John Hopkins University (1997) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa (2008). He joined the department here at Western in 2008. He teaches courses primarily in American literature, with a particular interests in religion, science fiction, and the fantastic in literature and film.

M&L: What was your weekday routine like as a major? 

EH: I went to class by day and read books and wrote papers at night. Pretty exciting, huh? It took me a while to figure out that this is what I liked and was relatively good at, though; I started pre-med, switched to international relations, then did psych for a semester before ending up an English and Hispanic Studies double major.

M&L: What were your weekends like? 

EH: When I wasn’t on a baseball field or learning to play the guitar (very badly, in retrospect), I was probably reading or writing papers. I did go to a couple of pretty wild churches in that period. No, not an oxymoron! One of these communities was made up primarily of Korean Americans and served kimchi after every service; another was based in an impoverished neighborhood that would be very recognizable to fans of The Wire.

M&L: What book were all the majors reading beyond what was assigned for class?

EH: I wasn’t aware of a lot of extracurricular book reading. We were assigned far more than most of us could manage in classes; the equivalent of a Victorian novel per week per class was common. However, I slowly started making newspaper reading a habit during these years, and not just the sports pages and comics.

M&L: What book changed your undergraduate life? 

EH: Among many . . . I’ll pick Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I came to college aware that racism existed, but also too prone to think the film Gone with the Wind was unvarnished history. 1990s rhetorical appeals to tolerance and seeking to just look past race therefore seemed appealing. Ellison helped me start to grasp my privilege in being able to imagine bypassing history in that manner, helping me feel how much fake concern that Black Americans had already endured in the early 1950s, not to mention four decades later when I first read this novel. I’ve since had the incredible opportunity to work through his manuscripts in the Library of Congress and to discuss this masterpiece’s ongoing significance with a half dozen classes of my own. 

M&L: Where did you hang out on campus? 

EH: An academic building that was open all night (no idea why) and that had pretty exciting vending machines in the basement. I worked with a friend in an upper-floor classroom so routinely that the custodian eventually gave us a poem for a Christmas present. He entitled it, “Stay in School.”

M&L: Where did you hang out off campus? 

EH: The National Aquarium in Baltimore and Camden Yards were among my favorite places to visit nearby—I did a great internship training dolphins at the former, even if it involved far more hours chopping fish and washing buckets than I expected—and my favorite day trip was to the Smithsonians in DC. Wish I could say there was a neighborhood cafe or bar that was also home, but I just wasn’t that cool.

M&L: What was your biggest adventure as an undergraduate English major? 

EH: A summer in Guatemala. I provided daily social services in a jail and once spent a day as the lone assistant to an obstetrician doing hysterectomies (I held things while he cut, and I was fine after the initial wave of nausea). I also got to travel in a lot of ancient school buses on winding mountain roads with potholes larger than the motorcycles flying by, holding on tight next to live chickens. My Spanish got waaaaaay better because it had to, and I gained some valuable perspective on both potential gifts and curses of growing up in the US.