The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Kathryn's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Kathryn
With research specialisms in early American literary studies, and the literatures of colonial New England especially, my work responds to questions of literary form, transatlantic print culture, and the politics of the cultural change and transformation in the colonial and indigenous landscapes of North America. More recently, I've developed research and teaching interests in early American environmental literatures and natural history.
My undergraduate teaching includes modules on American literature, including American crime fiction, and I have supervised, postgraduate projects on narratives of cultural encounter, dystopian fiction, narratives of gender in early modern and contemporary fiction, eighteenth-century letters, contemporary genre fiction and war poetry. I supervise projects in creative writing and literary studies.
As part of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower sailing in 2020, I supported the planning and delivery of a number of public projects, including the prize-winning Legend and Legacy exhibition at The Box (Plymouth’s Museum and Art Gallery) and the National Trust’s Tide and Time curatorial response. Postgraduate students have had opportunities to participate in these projects as part of their research training. In January 2020, I organised and hosted a day-long event showcasing research-led Mayflower-related projects at the University of Plymouth’s Research Festival.
My research, conferences and other research projects have been funded by the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Association for American Studies, Californian Institute for Technology, the University of Glasgow and the University of Plymouth, as well as the US Embassy Small Grants scheme. As part of my research, I've worked with archival resources from the American Antiquarian Society (Mass.), the Huntington Library (LA), The Royal Society, The Bodleian, and the British Library.
I was Research Co-ordinator and PGR lead for my Research Unit (UoA) 27 for REF 2021. I’m Strategic Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business (UoP) and I'm Chair of the Research Ethics and Integrity, sub-panel for Arts and Humanities.
Supervised Research Degrees
I have 3 PhD completions and 5 current PhD students.
I have examined 4 PhD projects.
Teaching
Undergraduate teaching
My core teaching interests are in American literature, and my two option modules, The American Novel and American Crime Writing, are part of the undergraduate English and Creative Writing programmes. In these modules students read some classic American texts, from Nathaniel Hawthorne and F.Scott Fitzgerald in American Novel, to writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy in American Crime.
I also lead the work-based learning module, Working with Literature, which gives students the opportunity to complete a placement as part of their undergraduate programme. The module also helps students articulate their subject-specific and transferable skills.
Graduate teaching
I contribute to the MA English and the MA Environmental Humanities with a module that explores recent American fiction in the context of environmental change. The module, 'Natural Knowledge and Narrative Knowing: Literatures of Nature in North America', seeks to contrast Euro-American models of natural knowledge with Indigenous North American knowledge systems.
I am interested in postgraduate research projects that are shaped around questions of cultural transformation and change, specifically in relation to print cultures, nature and the environment, settler colonialism, and indigenous cultures in the colonial Atlantic world.
