"Sidelights"

A scholar whose research focuses on representations of war and violence, Stacey Peebles has since 2009 served as assistant director of the University of North Carolina's Lloyd International Honors College. She joined the faculty of Centre College in 2011, where she is assistant professor of English. Peebles is also editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and has published many articles on his work as well as that of Flannery O'Connor, Terrence Malick, and Michael Herr. Her first book, Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq, examines and contextualizes the stories of American military deployed in the Gulf War and in the later Iraq War. The book was hailed as a timely and important study of war and social memory.

"I think it's tremendously important to be aware of and sensitive to soldiers' experiences--not just what happened to them, but how we're processing that experience as a culture," said Peebles in an article by Elizabeth Trollinger published on the Centre College Web site. The daughter of a Vietnam veteran who had been drafted into that war, Peebles had grown up hearing her father's stories and discussing with him the literary representations of that conflict by writers such as Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr. When the United States launched an invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 in...