Humanities and Arts

Contact Information

Office:
Salisbury Laboratories, 125
Phone: +1-508-831-5246
Fax: +1-508-831-5932
kboudreau@wpi.edu

Kristin Boudreau

• Associate Dean
• Professor & Department Head, Humanities & Arts
• Affiliated with:
  • American Studies
  • English
  • Literature
  • Writing & Rhetoric

Kristin Boudreau’s research interests involve the ways literature reflects on and intervenes in cultural transformations. Professor Boudreau has written about the literature of slavery, the labor movement, capital cases, and modernization. After teaching in English departments for 17 years, she came to WPI in 2009 to chair the Department of Humanities and Arts and has taught HUA writing courses and "Feed the World" in the Great Problems Seminar.

Professor Boudreau finds WPI an invigorating environment because the value of the humanities and arts is built into the curriculum. In "Feed the World," for example, as students work to respond to dramatic challenges brought on by striking demographic shifts and climate change, they look to the past to see how earlier generations faced similar crises. They learn that 18th-century Europeans also faced "the great question," as Thomas Malthus wrote in 1798, of whether humankind would speed toward unprecedented improvements or plunge into misery. They learn they are not alone as they read the opening of Malthus's groundbreaking book An Essay on the Principle of Population: "The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French Revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind."