KAREN KILCUP has broad research and teaching interests in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature.  Her intellectual project aims to reintegrate fractured literary traditions, reshape literary orthodoxies, and highlight the durable power of affective literature. To these ends, her work investigates such questions as: What are the intellectual, conceptual, and practical relationships between and among male and female writers, multiethnic and dominant-society authors, working-class and bourgeois writers? How can we best understand their conversations with one another? How are elite and popular traditions related, and how do those relationships evolve over time and place? Kilcup's interests in contemporary American literary and cultural theory include ecocriticism, affect studies, and material feminism, as well as genre, reader response, and canon theory; her current research focuses on nineteenth-century American poetry, environmental literature, women's writing, and children's literature.

Recipient of a U.S. national Distinguished Teacher award, Professor Kilcup has been awarded Andrew W. Mellon and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships as well as the Dorothy M. Healy Visiting Professorship in Maine, the Edna and Jordan Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair in the Humanities in Miami, and the Chair of American Literatures at the Universität Bern in Switzerland for the study of American literature and culture. 

She served as President of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers from 2004-2009 and has given numerous presentations, including lectures at Cambridge, York, and Sheffield Universities in England, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and SANAS in Switzerland. 

 
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Publications  

Monographs and Selected Articles

Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781-1924 (Georgia, 2013)

Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Michigan, 1999)

“‘Frightful Stories’: Captivity, Conquest, and Justice in Lydia Maria Child’s Native Narratives,”  Children’s Literature Association Quarterly  (forthcoming)

“Writing against Wilderness: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Elite Environmental Justice,”  Western American Literature

“Frado Taught a Naughty Ram: Animal and Human Natures in Our Nig,”  ELH

“Embodied Pedagogies: Femininity, Diversity, and Community in Anthologies of Women’s Writing, 1836-2009,”  Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers

“‘Fresh Leaves’: Practicing Environmental Criticism,”  PMLA

“‘I like these plants that you call weeds’: Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing,” Nineteenth Century Literature

“Anthologizing Matters: The Poetry and Prose of Recovery Work,” SYMPLOKE

Recovery Anthologies and Scholarly Editions

Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Children's Poetry (Johns Hopkins, 2013)

A Cherokee Woman's America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907 (Florida, 2005)

From Beacon Hill to the Crystal Palace: the 1851 Travel Diary of a Working-Class Woman (Iowa, 2002)

Native American Women Writers c. 1800-1924: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000)

Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Modern Language Association, 2005)

Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa, 1999)

Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (Florida, 1999)

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader  (Blackwell, 1998)

Special issues on nineteenth-century American women writers for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (2008), Colby Quarterly (1998), and the European Journal of American Culture (Over Here) (1997)

Editor of Studies in American Humor  (1999-2004)

Current or past editorial board member of Anthologies, Blackwell Publishers; Comparative American Studies; European Journal of American Culture; Journal of Gender Studies;  Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; The Robert Frost Review; Robert Frost Series, Harvard University Press; Studies in American Humor; and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Scholarly manuscript reviewer for over 25 presses, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford University Presses

You can buy Professor Kilcup's books by clicking on title links above or by searching for used copies at this link.