Humanities and Arts
Kristin Boudreau
Professor and Department Head
Department: Humanities & Arts
Professional Page
Office: Salisbury Laboratories, 129
Phone: +1-508-831-4191
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
kboudreau@wpi.edu
Educational Background
- B.A., Cornell University, 1987 ,
- M.A., University of Rochester, 1989
- Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1992
Research & Teaching Interests
18th-20th century American literature; history and culture; populist literature; slavery and literature; 19th century travel literature; literature and philosophy.
Research
My research investigates cultural influences on literature and literary influences on culture: I have written essays on the ways that imaginative writers reflect on medicine, slavery, modernization, crimes and executions, and political movements, and my books consider the ways that literature helps to shape American sentiments. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Florida, 2002) and The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases (Prometheus, 2006) investigate the complex relationships between books, the people who read them, and the institutions that give structure to human communities. I have published essays on Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Henry James, Alice James, William James, Toni Morrison, early American broadsides, American murder trials, and labor movement elegies in various journals and books. I am editing a Broadside Press edition of Henry James's Daisy Miller and have just finished a book (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan) called Henry James's Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition. In 2005 I took part in an NEH seminar on Emerson and philosophy and am looking forward to returning to a project on Emerson and Melville.
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