Assistant Professor
Department of English

Office: Rosenwald 415C
heatherk@uchicago.edu

I am currently working on a book titled "Animals and Other People: Forms of Life in Eighteenth-Century Literature," which examines how a range of eighteenth-century writers link issues of literary form to ontological and political questions about animal life.  I begin this project by asking why so many eighteenth-century poets, novelists, and children's writers take up literary figures and forms that foreground the relationship between humans and other species: forms like personification, the life narrative, or fable. I argue that writers use these literary forms to rethink the mechanisms by which social and political community is shaped, and to consider who or what this community includes.  Most generally, then, my research explores the particular formal resources that literature has for representing or reflecting on nonhuman animals, and conversely, how attention to animals can help us to think about aspects of literary form that are shaped by ideas of human or animal being, or by the logic of species.

Graduate:  The Lives of Animals.

Undergraduate:  Media Aesthetics; The Lives of Animals; The Rise of the Novel.

"Personification for the People: On James Thomson's The Seasons."
forthcoming from ELH

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2008.  Teaching at Chicago since 2008.