Faculty/Staff Directory

Dr. Loretta Clayton

Loretta Clayton

Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of English
Office of Graduate Studies

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Biography: Dr. Loretta Clayton has a B.A. from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she studied philosophy, history, and literature in the College of Letters. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She joined the former Macon State College in 2007, before which she taught at the New School University in New York, NY and Fordham University in Bronx, NY as well as at Washington University. At Middle Georgia State University, Dr. Clayton has taught classes in literature, theory, and interdisciplinary studies. She has published on the writings of Oscar Wilde and Victorian discourses of aestheticism and fashion and received a travel grant and an NEH fellowship to study at the Wilde Archive at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Library. She is currently at work on a collection of academic writings on fashion using various methodologies related to the field of Performance Studies and other new and experimental approaches to fashion as scholarly inquiry.
Courses: MGA: “Fashion, Literature & Culture,” “Performance, Literature & Culture,” “Gender Studies,” “Modern Drama,” “Literature by Women,” “Literary Theory,” "Literature of Sensation: British Gothic to American Pulp," “Nineteenth-Century British Poetry & Prose,” "Twentieth-Century British Poetry & Prose," “Survey of British Literature: Romantic to Modern," "Internship in Graduate Studies"

The New School: “Major British Writers of the Nineteenth Century,” “Oscar Wilde: Readings and Revisions,” “Oscar Wilde and Fin-de-Siècle Culture,” “Aesthetes, Dandies, and Decadents,” “Fashions of Modernity”

Washington University: “Introduction to Women’s Texts,” “Childhood, Adolescence, and Society,” “Advanced Composition and Rhetoric,” “Writing Across the Curriculum”
Education: Ph.D., English and American literature from Washington University in St. Louis
M.A., English and American literature from Washington University in St. Louis
B.A., College of Letters, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
Organizations: South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) - Program Committee Member (2017-2020; Chairperson, 2021)
Georgia Council of Graduate Schools (GCGS) - President (2018-2019)
Modern Language Association (MLA)
North America Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)
Victorians Institute
Awards and Honors: Senior Provost Fellow for Graduate Studies, Middle Georgia State University (2021-2022)
Chair, South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Program Committee (2020-2021)
President, Georgia Council of Graduate Schools (GCGS) (2017-18)
University Award for Outstanding Teaching, Middle Georgia State University (2016)
Summer Workshop Appointment, National Council of Graduate Schools (2016)
University of California at Los Angeles Travel Grant to the Wilde Archive (2009)
NEH Fellowship: Seminar on Oscar Wilde, William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA (2007)
Publications: "No Room for the ‘Woman of Fashion:’ Male Authorship, Anti-fashion, and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.“ Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Gerald Egan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

“Oscar Wilde, Aesthetic Dress, and the Modern Woman: Or Why Sargent’s Portrait of Ellen Terry Appeared in the Woman’s World.” Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives. Ed. Joseph Bristow. University of Toronto Press, 2013.



“The Aesthete and His Audience: Oscar Wilde in the 1880s.” Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Annette Magid. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.



“Becoming Modern: Reforming Women’s Dress in Victorian England and America.” Gender and Victorian Reform. Ed. Anita R. Rose. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.



"‘Arbiter of the Elegancies?’ Oscar Wilde as Editor." Oscar Wilde: The Man, His Writings, and His World. Ed. Robert N. Keane. AMS Press, Inc., 2003.


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