Katie Van Wert joined UMD's English faculty after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) in 2012. She has taught courses on modern American, British, and global Anglophone literature; critical theory; creative writing; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; and medical humanities. Her research interests include transnational modernism, literatures of empire, poetry and poetics, and philosophies of human subjectivity. Her current research is an interdisciplinary examination of theories of self as they have developed in literature, cultural studies, and materialist philosophy. She advises various student groups at UMD, including The UMD-Duluth Storytelling Project (a volunteer collaboration between student writers and disabled adults) and the Literary Guild.
Courses Taught
ENGL 1001: Great American Authors
ENGL 1582: Introduction to World Literature
ENGL 1585: Australian and New Zealand Literature and Culture
ENGL 1666: Tales of Terror
ENGL 1801: American Gothic
ENGL 2581: The Art of Memoir: Reading and Writing the Memoir
ENGL 2662: Women Writers
WRIT 3160: Advanced Writing for Social Sciences
ENGL 3564: American Literature II (1864-present)
ENGL 3573: African American Literature
ENGL 3411: Modern Short Story
ENGL 3115: Fiction Writing
ENGL 3906: Methods of Literary Study
ENGL 4292: Literature Into Film
ENGL 5375: Modern Poetry (Graduate)
ENGL 5584: Mapping Postcolonial Literature (Graduate)
ENGL 5741: The Novella (Graduate)
Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies:
WGSS 3595: Special Topic: Feminism, Gender, and Medicine
Interdisciplinary Studies Program:
IS 2001: Sustainability Across Disciplines
IS 3093: Senior Capstone
Publications
Review of The Post-War Experimental Novel: British and French Fiction, 1945-75 by Andrew Hodgson (2020). Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 45.1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2181
“Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf and Lacan contra Deleuze.” In Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, eds. Slavoj Zizek and Russell Sbriglia. Northwestern University Press, 2020. 209-226.
“Becoming Animal, Becoming Other: Modernism, Millennial Jurisprudence, and the Limits of Materialist Subjectivity.” In Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, eds. Robin Hackett, Molly Hall, and Kara Watts. University Press of Florida, 2019. 213-235.
“Elizabeth Bishop and the Mechanics of Poetic Pretence.” Twentieth Century Literature 64.2 (June 2018), pp. 191-222.
Review of Unseasonable Youth: modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development by Jed Esty, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter J.Kalliney, and What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and the Invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee. Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 3.5 (Fall 2015), pp. 125-133.
Review of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Samantha Coole and Diana Frost. Modern Language Studies 43.2 (Winter 2014), pp. 66-71.
“The Early Life of Septimus Smith.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (Fall 2012), pp. 71-89.