Katie Van Wert joined UMD's English faculty after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY) in 2012. She has taught courses on modern American, British, and global Anglophone literature; critical theory; creative writing; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; and health humanities. Her research interests include transnational modernism, poetry, psychoanalysis, and plant studies, and she is working on a book about the more-than-human turn in contemporary literature. She advises various student groups at UMD, including The UMD-Duluth Storytelling Project (a volunteer collaboration between student writers and adults with brain injuries), and is a certified death doula.
Courses Taught
ENGL 1001: Great American Authors
ENGL 1582: Introduction to World Literature
ENGL 1585: Australian and New Zealand Literature and Culture
ENGL 1666: Tales of Terror
ENGL 1801: American Gothic
ENGL 2581: The Art of Memoir: Reading and Writing the Memoir
ENGL 2662: Women Writers
WRIT 3160: Advanced Writing for Social Sciences
ENGL 3564: American Literature II (1864-present)
ENGL 3573: African American Literature
ENGL 3411: Modern Short Story
ENGL 3115: Fiction Writing
ENGL 3906: Methods of Literary Study
ENGL 4292: Literature Into Film
ENGL 4450: Banned Books
ENGL 4564: British Literature After 1900
ENGL 5375: Modern Poetry (Graduate)
ENGL 5584: Mapping Postcolonial Literature (Graduate)
ENGL 5741: The Novella (Graduate)
Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies:
WGSS 3595: Special Topic: Feminism, Gender, and Medicine
Interdisciplinary Studies Program:
IS 2001: Sustainability Across Disciplines
IS 3093: Senior Capstone
Selected Publications
“Virginia Woolf and Deep Ecology,” forthcoming in Virginia Woolf and Ecologies: The Selected Papers from the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf,” eds. Laci Mattison and Shilo McGiff. Clemson UP (2025).
“Talking Trees: Arboreal Messaging and the Metaphysics of Voice,” forthcoming in Plants Beyond Borders, eds. Alicia Carroll and Courtney Ryan. Ohio State UP (2025).
“‘Letting Oneself Matter’: The Dangers of Skepticism in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,” forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies (2025).
“‘Driven by An Unseizable Force’: Virginia Woolf and the Invention of the Death Drive.” Woolf Studies Annual Vol. 29 (2023), pp. 107-124.
“Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf and Lacan contra Deleuze.” In Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, eds. Slavoj Zizek and Russell Sbriglia. Northwestern University Press, 2020. 209-226.
“Becoming Animal, Becoming Other: Modernism, Millennial Jurisprudence, and the Limits of Materialist Subjectivity.” In Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, eds. Robin Hackett, Molly Hall, and Kara Watts. University Press of Florida, 2019. 213-235.
“Elizabeth Bishop and the Mechanics of Poetic Pretence.” Twentieth Century Literature 64.2 (June 2018), pp. 191-222.
“The Early Life of Septimus Smith.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 71-89.