We work alongside three campus partners who also care for O’Connor’s legacy. Each brings its own strengths to preserving her work, studying it, and sharing it with the world.
Andalusia and the Division of Historic Museums
In 2017, the Flannery O’Connor Andalusia Foundation, formed by members of O’Connor’s family to preserve the farm, gave Andalusia to the university. Now a National Historic Landmark run by the Division of Historic Museums, the farm looks much as it did when O’Connor lived there. The award-winning Andalusia Interpretive Center, which opened in 2023, welcomes guests and hosts rotating exhibitions. Guided tours of the main house, which keeps many of its original furnishings, offer a personal look at where and how she wrote. Beyond the house, historic outbuildings and the Tobler Creek Trail invite visitors to explore the farm at their own pace.
Special Collections at Ina Dillard Russell Library
The Flannery O’Connor Collection at Ina Dillard Russell Library is a cornerstone of O’Connor research. Library staff started the collection in 1946, while she was still a graduate student at Iowa. It holds letters, manuscripts, film, photos, and memorabilia from her family and from scholars of her work, along with her extensive personal library, annotated in her own hand. Other holdings in Special Collections help place her life and work in context. The University Archives preserve the student publications, photographs, and records of the college she attended, and the local history collections document the people and places of Milledgeville and Baldwin County.
The Flannery O’Connor Review and the Department of English
The Flannery O’Connor Review is the scholarly journal devoted to her life and work. Published each year by the Department of English and distributed through JSTOR, ProQuest, and EBSCO, it reaches readers and researchers internationally. Its editor, Dr. Matt Bryant Cheney, is an assistant professor of English and president of the Flannery O’Connor Society. He follows Dr. Bruce Gentry, professor emeritus of English, who led the journal for 23 years.
The department is also home to a renowned MFA program in creative writing, taught by working writers whose work appears in leading national journals. For more than 25 years, the program published the national literary journal Arts & Letters, and in spring 2027, MFA students and faculty will launch its successor, Peach. Undergraduates publish their own poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and music in The Peacock’s Feet.