Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1979

Carl Malmgren is Emeritus Professor. He taught twentieth-century literature and literary theory at the University of New Orleans for more than 30 years. In that time he published three books of literary criticism and theory—one on postmodern fiction, one on science fiction, and one on mystery and detective fiction—and more than 30 articles. His fields of specialization are twentieth-century fiction and narrative theory, and most of his scholarship has combined these interests.

Malmgren has also published a novel set in Paris in the 1920s. Based on an intensive study of the period and featuring appearances by Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald and other luminaries, Paris Metro, a novel with footnotes, purports to “solve” the unsolved murder left over from Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. The novel won Omega Publications Prize for Best First Novel of 2010 and was published by that press in December 2010.

The Fulbright Commission has, on three different occasions, acknowledged Malmgren’s expertise in American studies by awarding him grants to teach in Europe, first in France, then in Sweden, most recently in England. In the spring of 1995, the British Library and the Fulbright Commission sent Malmgren to Hungary as the Eccles Lecturer in American Culture where he gave lectures on recent developments in literary theory and on multiculturalism and political correctness. Malmgren was also invited to be Visiting Professor in American Literature at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. An avid Europhile, he has served as Academic Director for the UNO-Innsbruck Summer School on four different occasions.

This past summer Malmgren checked off an item in his bucket list by swimming in the seven “seas”—the Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean.