Associate Professor

American Literary Studies

Contact Information

Email: wichelns@unm.edu
Office Location: Parish Library B01-CU17

Biography

Dr. Kathryn Wicheln's PhD in Comparative Literature is from Emory University. In her scholarship and teaching, she focuses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America in transnational context, women's writing, queer writing, and social movements addressing the interdependent concepts of race, gender, sexuality, class, and American belonging. Her book, White Woman's Burden: Race, Empire, and Influence in Writing by U.S. Women's Rights Activists (SUNY, 2026) examines four U.S. writer-activists who were significant if secondary actors in the historical push for two rights that disproportionately served elite women: suffrage and equal higher education. White Woman's Burden revisits mainstream feminist responses to nineteenth-century ideas about gender, arguing that elite women's practices of social power developed during that period continue to shape our ideas about womanhood and activism into the present. Dr. Wicheln's book, Henry James’s Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras (Palgrave, 2018) explores the ways that James served as a lens through which women writers living in different times and places critically examined their own era’s ideas about authorship. Dr. Wicheln's work has also been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative Literature, Early American Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Henry James Review, among others. She brings multidisciplinary approaches to reading American literature into the classroom, so that her students (and her) get to explore a range of sources and ideas together: journalism, science writing, popular media, political writing, and visual art are important to understanding the more conventionally literary texts discussed. She is currently at work on her third book, tentatively titled Rural Feminists: Writing America from the Diverse Hinterlands.