Karen L. Kilcup

KAREN KILCUP has broad research and teaching interests in 19th- and earlier 20th-century American literatures; her work has encompassed women and gender, romanticism and regionalism, poetry and poetics, humor, and American multicultural literatures (especially Native American). Her interests in contemporary American literary and cultural theory include ethnocriticism, feminism, and new historicism, as well as genre, reader response, and canon theory. Recipient of a US national Distinguished Teacher award (1987), Professor Kilcup has also been awarded the distinguished Dorothy M. Healy Visiting Professorship for the study of nineteenth-century American women writers (1996), an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for the study of American women's diaries (1997), and the Edna and Jordan Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair in the Humanities in Miami (2000).  

...................

She has been Chair of the Foerster Prize Committee (1999), which selects the best essay in American Literature, and has given numerous presentations, including invited lectures at Cambridge University in England, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and Universität Bern in Switzerland. Editor of Studies in American Humor and an editorial board member of Comparative American Studies, European Journal of American Culture, and The Robert Frost Review, Professor Kilcup has edited special issues on nineteenth-century American women writers for Colby Quarterly (1998) and the European Journal of American Culture (1997). Her publications include 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), Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa, 1999), Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (Florida, 1999), Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Michigan, 1998), Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader  (Blackwell, 1998), Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1997), “Anthologizing Matters: The Poetry and Prose of Recovery Work,” “Emily Dickinson’s Pearls,” “‘“Men work together,” I told him from the heart’: Frost’s (In)Delicate Masculinity,” “‘Quite Unclassifiable’: Crossing Genres, Crossing Genders in Twain and Greene,” “‘Essays of Invention’: Transformations of Advice in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing,” “Reading Trickster; Or, Theoretical Reservations and a Seneca Tale,” and “‘I stop somewhere waiting for you’: Whitman’s Femininity and the Reader of Leaves of Grass.” Her forthcoming work includes “‘I like these plants that you call weeds’: Historicizing American Women's Nature Writing,” Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907 (Florida, 2003), Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry (Modern Language Association, 2003), and The Selected Writings of Ora Eddleman Reed (Nebraska, 2004). You can buy Professor Kilcup's books by clicking on title links above or by searching for used copies at this link.