Dr. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Griffith T. Pugh Professor of English, Emeritus, at Florida State University, earned his BA in English at the University of Virginia, minoring in Aeronautical Engineering, Mathematics, and Humanities. He was elected to Phi Eta Sigma and Phi Beta Kappa and graduated With Distinction in 1964. He held James B. Duke, Woodrow Wilson, and Danforth Fellowships and was the Teaching Assistant for President Douglass Knight while finishing his MA and Ph.D. in English at Duke University. Professor Bickley completed his doctorate in 1969 and joined the Florida State University faculty the same year. He was promoted to Associate Professor of English in 1975 and to Professor in 1979.

Professor Bickley's primary areas of teaching and research are nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature and folklore, Southern literature, cultural studies, and advanced composition. He also teaches and consults regularly for more than 20 state and federal agencies and departments and for private corporations in the fields of technical and professional writing and editing. Dr. Bickley is a member of the American Literature Association; the College English Association; the Florida College English Association, which he served as Executive Secretary for four years; the South Atlantic Modern Language Association; the Hawthorne and Melville Societies; and the Joel Chandler Harris Association and its Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, serving on the Society's Bibliography Committee. In addition to publishing several dozen articles, book chapters, and reviews, Professor Bickley has presented over 60 papers at state, regional, and national conferences. Dr. Bickley has also published the following books:

The Method of Melville's Short Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1975. Critical study. 142 pp.

Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Biography and critical study. 174 pp.

Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide. In collaboration with Karen L. Bickley and Thomas H. English. Boston: G. K. Hall Publishers, 1978. Annotated secondary bibliography, 1862-1976. 1442 entries. 360 pp.

Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. 46 contemporaneous reviews and 18 essays, including 3 commissioned essays. 240 pp.

Joel Chandler Harris. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Reprint of the 1978 biography and critical study with an updated secondary bibliography. 174 pp.

Joel Chandler Harris: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1977-1996, with Supplement, 1892-1976. Co-authored with Hugh T. Keenan; Bickley is the primary author. 448 entries. 184 pp.

Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study.  Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse.com, 2000.  Reprint of the 1987 study.  A biography and critical examination of Harris's canon.  178 pp.

Nights with Uncle Remus, by Joel Chandler Harris. New York, Penguin Classics edition of Harris's 1883 collection of 71 African American trickster tales. 7,000-word introduction; textual note; secondary bibliography. Co-edited with John T. Bickley. October 2003.

Professor Bickley served as the Acting Associate Dean of Florida State University's College of Arts and Sciences in 1978-1979; as the Associate Dean during 1983-1990 and 1991-1992; and as the Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences in 1990-1991. Among his other Arts and Sciences activities and initiatives as Associate Dean, Dr. Bickley coordinated all academic affairs for the College and served as academic liaison to the Registrar, Dean of Faculties, Council of Deans, Orientation Office, Admissions, and other offices; coordinated undergraduate and graduate advising for the College's 19 departments and programs; managed scholarship, fellowship, tuition waiver, and teaching award programs; served as space-allocation officer for the College; launched the College's first newsletter, The Arts and Sciences Chronicle; compiled an Arts and Sciences Performance Profile to highlight and market major faculty and department achievements and other essential data; and began annual Arts and Sciences fund-raising campaigns, reaching over 22,000 alumni/nae the first year. The working budget that Dr. Bickley administered during 1990-1991, as Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences, was $27.8 million in salaries, across 418 faculty lines and 289 staff positions; $2.2 million in expense; $3.1 million in other personnel services (teaching and research assistants and other non-salary-line personnel expenditures); $19 million in contract and grant activity; and $2 million in contract and grant research overhead distributions and reserves.

Professor Bickley served as the Director of the University Honors Program from 1994-1999, adding several new components to the Program during that period. Among these initiatives were offering Honors courses abroad, at Florida State University's study centers in England, Italy, Spain, Russia, France, and Costa Rica; establishing the Bess Ward Overseas Study Scholarship, to help fund overseas study for at least 30 Honors students each year; expanding the Honors in the Major advising program; redesigning and upgrading Honors administration; linking FSU's Honors Program to other Honors Programs around the state and helping to restructure the annual state Honors convention; initiating priority registration for Honors students; establishing the Superior Honors Teaching Award; and designing and administering the University Honors Colloquium, which currently serves over 800 entering Honors students each fall and which is modeled on the English Colloquium that Dr. Bickley had established for that department starting in 1993.

Dr. Bickley has chaired several College and University Committees, including the Faculty Senate's Undergraduate Policy Committee, which defined in 1974 the academic philosophy and educational goals of the university's Liberal Studies Program--a definition of the university's general education program that remains in effect through the present day.  In 1982-1984, Professor Bickley chaired the University's Self-Study Steering Committee for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' ten-year review, proposing the theme for the review (Enhancing Quality at Florida State University: Student, Faculty, and Curriculum Quality, and Funding for the Future) and charging the four Self-Study committees with their responsibilities.  The University Provost subsequently implemented all 120 recommendations made by the Self-Study Steering Committee.  Among other results, the Self-Study objectively documented and helped to market the regional and national rankings of FSU's programs, which proved to be the strongest in the state of Florida; enhanced student recruitment and advising programs; and recommended augmenting existing faculty lines across the university with proceeds from smaller, but more numerous, named endowments--a program the university is now aggressively implementing.  The Self-Study also established a broad-based, responsive standing Committee on Registration comprised of faculty, staff, and students, which Dr. Bickley subsequently co-chaired.

Additionally, Dr. Bickley was a founding member of the University Committee on Student Learning Disabilities, which implemented procedures whereby learning-disabled students could take selected alternative courses in order to satisfy university requirements.  From 1984-1994, Professor Bickley also chaired the McKnight Black Doctoral and Faculty Fellowship Liaision Committee, coordinating the recruitment of 60 new black doctoral students for Arts and Sciences, Social Sciences, and Science Education during that period.  In the 1980s, Dr. Bickley also chaired the committee that helped restructure preliminary exam preparation policies, enabling doctoral students at the university to complete their prelims and 24-credit-hour dissertation requirements up to a semester early.  In addition, he co-chaired the Undergraduate Committee of FSU's Commission on Pluralism and has also served recently on selection committees that nominated outstanding master's theses and dissertations for the Council of Graduate Schools and the Council of Southern Graduate Schools annual student competitions.  Additionally, Professor Bickley has served on search committees to recruit technical writers and editors for the university's Office of Distributed and Distance Learning.  He has served as the Technical Writing Consultant for a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to Manatee Community College, Sarasota, Florida, to help establish a writing-across-the-curriculum program for that college. Dr. Bickley has also designed and taught a blended-learning, on-campus and on-line Professional Writing and Editing Workshop for senior staff from the Internal Revenue Service.

Professor Bickley won a Division of Student Affairs "Being There" Award for exceptional accessibility to students in 1987; a William R. Jones Most Valuable Mentor Award from the McKnight Program in 1992; and Florida State University's Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award in 1993. In 2000 he won the Omicron Delta Kappa-Gold Key "Overall Award" for sustained excellence in scholarship, service, administration, and teaching at the university. Additionally, Dr. Bickley won a University Teaching Award in 2001. He has also directed 18 BA Honors Theses, Masters Theses, and Doctoral Dissertations; has served on more than 50 Doctoral Committees; and has supervised 100 Teaching Assistants. Additionally, Professor Bickley has served as Head Doctoral Marshal at University Commencements since 1979, as Vice-President and President of the FSU Phi Kappa Phi chapter, and as Chair of the Membership Committee and Historian of FSU's Alpha of Florida Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Bickley's hobbies include a cappella barbershop harmony music. He is a member of SPEBSQSA and sings bass with The Capital Chordsmen and with Equal Time, a men's and women's mixed-voice quartet.  Equal Time is a registered member of the national Mixed Harmony Barbershop Quartet Association. The website for Equal Time is http://www.geocities.com/swwise

Dr. Bickley is married to Karen Bickley, who earned her BA in English with a minor in French, Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, with Honors, from Duke University, and her MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where she held a tuition scholarship.  Mrs. Bickley is the former Coordinator of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion at Florida State University and the former Coordinator of  the Humanities Instititute at Florida State.  Mrs. Bickley is currently Director of Credit Programs at Florida State University's Center for Professional Development, where she has won three national awards for her superior educational programming in the humanities and social sciences. Mrs. Bickley has also written over 40 successful national and state grants in the humanities and social sciences.  The Bickleys have four children, Kathryn, David, John, and Scott.

Professor Bickley can be reached at the following addresses:

Dr. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr.
Department of English
418 Williams Building
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

Telephone:  850.644.3243     Fax:  850.644.0811

Email:  bbickley@english.fsu.edu    Website:  http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~bbickley