Academic

Research

Katherine is currently working on two academic books. In the first, she considers how nineteenth-century novels about characters who actively construct collective identities and communities (such as cliques, gangs, and circles). She is particularly interested in the techniques used to narrate group activity and identity. In the second, she uses the term “hobbledehoy,” used to describe awkward youths in the nineteenth century, to interrogate narratives of growth and the categories of adult and child in Victorian literature. She has presented her work at conferences by the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Children’s Literature Association, Modern Language Association, and others.

Katherine has published articles on awkward female adolescence and makeovers in mid-Victorian family chronicles in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the group Robinsonade in Nineteenth-Century Literature, the flourishing of “odd” girls in early Girl Guide patrols  in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Soviet folkloric fantasy in Marvels and Tales. She has also written on self-narrativizing practices within diasporic communities in the Hungarian Studies Review.

Teaching

Most recently, Katherine has taught Fairy Tales at Fairfield University and Folk and Fairy Tales at Simmons University’s Department of Children’s Literature. As a course instructor, teaching assistant and guest lecturer at the University of Toronto, Katherine has taught children’s literature, narrative and the novel, and the Victorian novel. She has also been a guest lecturer on Victorian fantasy and narrative at Texas A&M University.

Articles

“Awkward and Awry: Novel Directions for Female Growth in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 14.3 (2018). You can read “Awkward and Awry” here and read more from the journal here.

“Translating Russian Folklore into Soviet Fantasy in Arkadi and Boris Strugatski’s Monday Begins on Saturday and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless.” Marvels and Tales 31.2 (2017): 338-369.

“Odd Woman, Odd Girls: Reconsidering Agnes and Robert Baden-Powell’s How Girls Can Build Up the Empire: The Handbook for Girl Guides.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41.3 (2016): 238-262.

“‘Sacred Ties of Brotherhood’: The Social Mediation of Imperial Ideology in The Last of the Mohicans and Canadian Crusoes.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 71.3 (2016): 315-342.

“Hungarian Scouting in Exile: Frame Narratives and the Creation of a Diasporic Community.” Hungarian Studies Review 42 (2015): 135-162.

Encyclopedia Articles

“Children’s Fantasy by Victorian Women Writers.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. 29 February 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_248-1.

“Anne Thackeray Ritchie.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. 19 July 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_270-1.