Karen L Kilcup

Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor of English, Environmental & Sustainability Studies,
and Women’s & Gender Studies

Karen and Topaz 

Karen L 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.

You may contact Professor Kilcup by email: klkilcupATuncg.edu or academicATkarenkilcupDOTorg