Terry Barr

Terry Barr

Terry Barr has taught Modern Literature, Film Studies, and Ethnic Literature at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, since 1987. A 1979 graduate of the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama, Barr did his graduate work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

While growing up in Bessemer, Alabama, Barr attended First Methodist Church with his mother, while his father got to stay at home and read the Sunday paper. Though they shared a love for Alabama football, Barr and his Dad never discussed the implications of his Dad’s Jewish faith until, when first hired by Presbyterian College, Barr discovered that the college’s hiring policies prohibited anyone who wasn’t a member of a Christian church from teaching there.

Thus began Barr’s journey to discovering his half-Jewish roots, a search which resulted in his publishing numerous articles and essays about Jewish subjects in popular and academic journals. One article in particular, “Rabbi Grafman and Birmingham’s Civil Rights Era,” published in The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, featured the man who refused to perform Barr’s parents’ mixed Christian-Jewish wedding in 1952. In 2006, Presbyterian College changed its hiring policy, and Barr has come at least halfway out of the closet.

Barr lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with his wife and two daughters…and their two cats.

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