Faculty Bio

Karen M. Poremski

Associate Professor of English

Education

B.A., University of Maryland-College Park
M.A., San Francisco State University
Ph.D., Emory University

About

Karen Poremski’s teaching and research focus particularly on early American literature and culture from the contact period through the nineteenth century. Her dissertation work studied captivity narratives—stories of settlers taken prisoner by natives—and argued that several U.S. authors between the Revolution and the Civil War used the tropes of captivity to change the cultural discourse about race, gender, and nationhood.

She is engaged in a new project examining the ways in which American authors wrote about land—including the territory that became Ohio—just after the Revolution, and how the debate around land continues in contemporary Native American writing and activism. She teaches composition, American literature (before 1900), women’s literature, and Native American literature.

Publications / Presentations

• Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom.  A Play by Susanna Haswell Rowson, edited and introduced by Jennifer L. Margulis and Karen M. Poremski (Copley Publishing, 2000).
• Roads to Reconciliation: Conflict and Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Amy Benson Brown (M. E. Sharpe, 2005).

Winner of the 2006 Sherwood Dodge Shankland Award for Encouragement of Teachers