Pamela Howell

It’s not every day that a girl from Stamps, Arkansas is summoned to the City of Dreaming Spires.  However, this past summer, that’s exactly what happened to MC Professor of English, Dr. Pamela Howell, who was invited to an Oxford Round Table to present her work, “No More Heroes: Positive Implications of the Radical Gospel of Jesus in Modern American Literature.”

The inspiration for Dr. Howell’s paper came 15 years ago from the song, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” performed by Tina Turner for the movie, Beyond Thunderdome.  What does the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max have to do with Jesus and American Literature?   Well, more than one might think.  In her investigation of works by Twain, Irving, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Eliot, she found a valuable space provided by the so-called “lack” of heroes, as she describes in her abstract: “The absence of heroes in modern culture, and in modern American literature in particular, is not a sign of cultural void in the West but instead gives rise to the discussion of the symbolic presence of the radical gospel of Jesus filling and informing that space.  This paper briefly discusses the concept of the hero in both culture and by extension literature and suggests how these concepts have changed to mirror the radical voice, not of Christianity, but of Jesus.”

This self-described “cultural anthropologist” had 15 minutes in which to present her work to her 40 fellow-conference attendees who sat with her in the Rhodes House (as in “Rhodes” Scholar) of the oldest university in England.   Some were from as far as Australia, Nigeria and Japan, and, of the entire group, Dr. Howell was one of only two representatives from a community college. 
While thrilled at the possibility of making the journey, Dr. Howell needed some financial assistance to reach the other side of the Atlantic.  The Jack A. Dalious Professional Development Fund from the Estate of Ella Mae Dalious—designed to benefit Midland College faculty—made her trip to Oxford possible by providing the funding for her travel and daily expenses.  “I was deeply blessed and privileged to have received this grant … I was excited and renewed by this marvelous experience,” she said.

In an otherwise rigorous schedule, Dr. Howell found the time to visit Stratford on Avon, where she saw the birthplace of the great bard, and the Globe Theatre.  She also visited Churchill’s ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, and walked the endless stacks of first editions in the famous Bodleian Library. “I’m really humbled that I got to make this trip ... that I was able to join with people from around the world, united by our love of literature,” she said.

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