President's Report - Gordon State College

25
President’s Report
In Her Own
Whedonverse
by Tamara Boatwright
When Rhonda Wilcox and her husband Richard were
looking for a home to purchase, they had had one requirement
to fulfill. Their then very young son said the house simply had
to have a fireplace.
“So Santa could get in,” Wilcox says with a grin. “So
there’s Jeff’s fireplace.”
There are traces of Jeff, now living in New York and working
as a guide at the Guggenheim Museum, all over the 1940s
bungalow Wilcox shares with her husband, Richard. There’s
a swing set the couple put up in the backyard for Jeff’s sixth
birthday that’s now serving as an ivy trellis. There’s a painting
of him peeking from behind an elephant ear leaf that a neighbor
did and there’s the enormous charcoal sketch he did of his
dad, a gift for Father’s Day, hanging on the wall.
All are special but looking at the swing causes a wistful
look to cross her face. “I can’t get rid of that swing set,”
Wilcox said. “It’s a sentimental thing.”
This home with the hand-painted tiles in the fireplace front
and the cozy kitchen is Wilcox’s escape of sorts. Sixty miles
from Gordon State College – she describes the commute as
“my time, a time when I’ve come up with my best ideas” –
she sits at a comfortable dining room table that serves as a
desk, a mug of warm tea nearby. She’s working on one of her
favorite things, a paper to present at the fifth Biennial Slayage
Conference on the Whedonverses.
Wilcox, an English professor at Gordon since 1985, is an
internationally known scholar on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
outgoing president of The Whedon Studies Association. Six
years ago the second biennial conference was held on the
campus of Gordon State College drawing hundreds of international
scholars. This year the conference went “international”
of sorts and was held in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Rhonda Wilcox
She started writing about Buffy in 1999, two years after
the show premiered on television and seven years after the
motion picture Buffy the Vampire Slayer was released. She
was given the “Mr. Pointy Award” in 2005 for the Best Book in
Buffy Studies, Why Buffy Matters.
And while she is internationally known for her knowledge
of Buffy and the writer who created Buffy, Joss Whedon, she
has yet to meet the man.
“Oh, I just don’t know what I would do,” she said of Whedon.
“He’s just so big now.”
But there’s more to her than Buffy and Whedon – both of
which play an integral part in her classroom.
Wilcox opened the year performing the Aretha Franklin
classic Chain of Fools with her husband’s band. He is a
librarian at Emory University and a part-time musician. She
recently performed with an English colleague of hers David
Janssen in Forsyth.
But most of her time is spent either in the classroom
where biology major Joseph Nestor says she is “very encouraging”
or with her Slayage studies.
“I really like what I do,” she said. “It is the busiest time of
my life and maybe I’d like it to be a little less insane, but I’d
also like to keep doing it – at least 10 more years.” w