Kate Singer

she/they

  • Mary Lyon Professor of Humanities
Kate Singer

Kate Singer鈥檚 research explores questions of gender, sexuality, race, in their material and figurative transmissions through affect, media, and nonhuman ecologies during the Romantic period. Her monograph, (SUNY 2019) contends that Romantic-era writers traced a posthuman affect, in response to the gendered cult of sensibility, whose genesis occurs through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together nonbinary human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature. She has likewise co-edited Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things (LUP 2020), and is currently co-editing a volume on Percy Shelley and a handbook on Global Romanticism.

Her current monograph thinks through the trope of shape shifting as a revolutionary figuration of nonbinary change in the Romantic period and beyond.

Her work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Literature Compass as well as volumes on Jane Austen, speculative realism, consciousness, automata, and new materialism. She serves as the President of the .

At Mount Holyoke, Singer teaches courses on British and global Romanticisms, affect theory, the Anthropocene and posthuman ecology, the queer and nonbinary eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Areas of Expertise

British Romanticism; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women鈥檚 writing; critical theory; digital humanities

Education

  • Ph.D., M.F.A., University of Maryland
  • B.A., Columbia University

Happening at Mount Holyoke

Recent campus news

含羞草研究所 students presented at a College-organized Black Studies and Romanticism conference.

Recent Publications

Singer, Kate. (2024). Creatrix Witches, Nonbinary Creatures, and Shelleyan Transmedia. In Omar F. Miranda and Kate Singer (Eds.), Percy Shelley for Our Times (pp. 214-237). Cambridge University Press.

Miranda, Omar F. and Singer, Kate (2024). Percy Shelley for Our Times. Cambridge University Press.

Singer, Kate (2024). 鈥淚 feel it coming in the air tonight鈥: Mephitical Vapors, Pestiferous Plagues, and the Psychosis of Materiality in Wollstonecraft. In Elizabeth Fay (Ed.) Romantic Psychosis. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Romantic Circles. .

Singer, K. (2024). 鈥淢ulti-dimensional Sex with Objects in Millenium Hall.鈥 In Kathryn Ready and David Sigler (Eds.), Romantic Women鈥檚 Writing and Sexual Transgression (pp. 30-51). Edinburgh University Press.

Singer, Kate. (2023). 鈥淔rom It鈥檚 the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Queer: Mary Shelley, Queer Affect, and Shapeshifting Through The Last Man.鈥 In Chris Washington, Editor, The Last Man: A Norton Critical Edition. W. W. Norton.

Recent Honors

Named President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America (k-saa.org), an international organization of more than 300 members devoted to the study and enjoyment of the works of Keats, the Shelleys, and the larger Romantic period. We support young scholars, provide events to the larger literary community of readers, and create community across academics, life-long literary enthusiasts, and young readers.

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