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Kathryn Kent Chair and Professor of English

Hollander Hall Rm 112

Office Hours:


B.A. Williams College (1988)
M.A. Duke University (1993)
Ph.D. Duke University, English (1996)

Areas of Expertise

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. literature; literary theory; queer theory; feminist and gender theory; US women’s literature; US queer literatures; cultural studies and cultural theory; biography; oral history


Note: courses in gray are not offered this academic year.

WGSS 105 / AMST 105 S / ENGL 105 S(F)

American Girlhoods

ENGL 343 T(S)

Whitman and Dickinson in Context

Current Committees



Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing, Duke University Press, 2003. Winner of a Choice Award from the American Library Association, 2003.

Books in Progress:

I Promise to Serve: Girl Scouting and the Normative

This book, an experimental project that combines personal narrative, oral histories, imaginative and historiographic claims, analyzes the ways in which Girl Scouting in the twentieth-century United States provided both a site for the reproduction of normative ideologies of gender, sexuality, nation, class, race and Christianity, while also simultaneously allowing for a wide range of “deviant” communities, representations, identifications and desires.

Eve Kosofsky Segdwick:  A Biography

This book will trace the development of Sedgwick’s intellectual, political and personal affiliations, the shifts in her work, as well as the importance of her scholarship and activism for the fields of, amongst others, English, Feminist Studies, and Queer Studies (the latter an interdisciplinary site of inquiry she is often credited with helping to found).  In addition, the book will consider how to represent Sedgwick’s relationships, obsessions, experiences, drawing upon the newly emerging field of “life writing” and Sedgwick’s own examples of experimental critical writing in order to explore innovative models for narrating a life.

Book Chapters:

“Queer Modernity: Lesbian Fiction,” The Blackwell’s Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950, eds. Peter Stoneley and Cynthia Weinstein, Blackwells, 2007.  Invited participant.

Journals Edited:

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Special Issue:  “Feminisms and Youth Cultures,” 23.2 (Spring 1998).


“’Surprising Recognition’:  Genre, Poetic Form, and Erotics from Sedgwick’s ‘The 1001 Seances’ to A Dialogue on Love,” GLQ 17.4 (Fall 2011):  497-510.

“Single White Female: The Sexual Politics of  Spinsterhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks,” American Literature 69.1 (March 1997): 39-65.

“No Trespassing’: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8.2 (1996):  185-203. Reprinted in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

‘Lullaby for a Ladies’ Lady’: Lesbian Identity in Ladies Almanack,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13:3 (Fall 1993): 89-96.

Review Articles:

“Troop 1500,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 5.3 (Summer 2007). Barnard Center for Research on Women. Invited participant.

Book Reviews:

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, GLQ (forthcoming)

Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Criticism 52.2 (Spring 2010).

Scenes of the Apple:  Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing, eds. Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran, Gastronomica, 2005.

Margaret Dickie, Stein, Bishop, and Rich:  Lyrics of Love, War, and Place, American Literature 73.3 (2001): 651-52.

Research Interests

Queer theory; gender and sexuality studies and U.S. literatures; Girl Scouting; U.S. Poetry

English MENU

