Rev. George Piggford, C.S.C.
Professor of English
Biography
George Piggford, C.S.C., spent his first twenty-five years in western Pennsylvania before moving to Montreal to pursue a doctorate in literary studies at the University of Montreal. After two years teaching at Tufts University, he entered formation for the Congregation of Holy Cross and earned an M.Div. at the University of Notre Dame. He joined Stonehill’s English faculty in 2004 and was ordained a priest in 2005.
Professor Piggford's research and teaching interests include modernism and postmodernism, ecology, mysticism, and Catholic literature.
Current work focuses on Irish literature, the Holy Cross playwright Harry Cornelius Cronin, and the spirituality of Flannery O'Connor. Professor Piggford has participated in the SURE program multiple times, working with student research assistants on O’Connor’s Southern Gothic and the Whitmanian tradition in American poetry.
Education
- B.A., M.A., Duquesne University
- M.Div., University of Notre Dame
- Ph.D., University of Montreal
Courses Taught
- Catholic Literature and the Modern World
- Christian Mysticism and Modern Literature
- Critical Theory: A History of Theory
- Irish Literature: Nationalism, Religion, and Mother Ireland (Travel Course)
- Tales of Mayhem & Mystery: An Introduction to Detective Fiction
Selected Publications and Articles
Prof. Piggford's scholarship on Flannery O’Connor can be found in Christianity & Literature, The Explicator, the Flannery O’Connor Review, and in volumes such as Christian Environmentalism and Human Responsibility in the 21st Century, Flannery O’Connor: A Political Companion, and Revelation & Convergence. Earlier work on the Bloomsbury Group appears in Mosaic, The Charleston Magazine, and in Queer Forster, co-edited with Robert K. Martin (Chicago, 1997). He edited E.M. Forster's The Feminine Note in Literature for the Bloomsbury Heritage series (Cecil Woolf, 2001). Other essays on contemporary literature are in Modern Drama, English Studies in Canada, and Cultural Critique.
- “Flannery O’Connor’s Integral Ecology,” in Christian Environmentalism and Human Responsibility in the 21st Century: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability. Routledge, 2024.
- “Laudato Si’, ‘The Mass on the World,’ and Flannery O’Connor’s Eucharistic Ecology,” in Weaving Words into Worlds. Vernon, 2023.
- “Time and the Tarot in W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole,’” co-written with Maureen DeLeo. The Explicator, 2019.
- “Flannery O’Connor’s Excavator and Dante’s Lucifer in ‘A View of the Woods.’” Flannery O’Connor Review, 2018.
- “Flannery O’Connor, Friedrich von Hügel, and ‘This Modernist Business,’” in Flannery O’Connor: A Political Companion. Kentucky, 2017.
- “Visions of Hell in Flannery O’Connor,” in The Hermeneutics of Hell: Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature. Palgrave, 2017.
- “Mrs. May’s Dark Night in ‘Greenleaf.’” Christianity & Literature, 2016.
- “Slavoj Žižek’s Passion (for the Real) and Flannery O’Connor’s Hermaphrodite.” International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016.
- “’A Dialogue Between Above and Below’: Flannery O’Connor, Martin Buber, and ‘Revelation’ after the Holocaust.” Flannery O’Connor Review, 2015.
- "The Via Negativa in Forster's A Passage to India," in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory. Wilfred Laurier, 2011.
- "Grace and Extravagance in Mark Doty's Elegies," in The Strategic Smorgasbord of Postmodernity. Cambridge Scholars, 2007.
- “’Looking into Black Skulls’: African-American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman,” in American Gothic. Iowa, 1998.