Associate Professor

American Literary Studies

Contact Information

Email: wichelns@unm.edu
Office Location: Humanities 363

Biography

Kathryn Wichelns earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University. Her scholarship focuses primarily on nineteenth-century America, using theories of the interdependent concepts of race, gender, sexuality, and class to understand writing of the period. In her first monograph, Henry James’s Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras (Palgrave, 2018), Prof. Wichelns explored the ways that James and his work served as a lens through which three women writers living in different times and places critically examined their own era’s ideas about femininity and authorship. Her background in multidisciplinary and transnational approaches to reading American literature and literary theory means that Prof. Wichelns asks her students to explore the ways that forms of cultural production reflect their social circumstances: journalism, science, popular media, political writing and other forms of print culture are important to understanding the more conventionally literary work we read together. Her articles have been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative Literature, Early American Studies, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Henry James Review, and others. She is currently working on her second monograph, titled White Woman’s Burden: Feminism, Privacy and Public Policy, 1860 – 1920.