Regina Young is Assistant Professor of English at University of the Cumberlands. She researches twentieth and twenty-first century literature and the environment, specializing in the bodily impact of industrial labor. Her current book project, Mining the Body: the Embodied Sacrifice Zone and Diversity in Coal Mining Activism, excavates the intersections of resource extraction and bodily exploitation in coal mining, positing that activism and union organizing respond to this use of the body as an “embodied sacrifice zone.” While focusing on Appalachian literature, her research demonstrates that diverse modes of activism in the coalfields occur both transregionally and transnationally, with writers and filmmakers positioning their craft/s as vital activist work. Her writing has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, About Place, and FOLK Magazine, with a forthcoming article appearing in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945.
Before joining the University of the Cumberlands, Dr. Young was a Colby Kullman Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where she served as a graduate instructor in the English Department and the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. As a consultant at UM’s Graduate Writing Center, she received the Bae Magruder Consultant of the Year Award. Currently, she serves as the Secretary for the Emerging Scholars Organization of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature and holds membership in the Space Between Society and the Feminist Inter/Modernist Association.