Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M.A., University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Williams College
About Me
Kirsten Lee specializes in early African American studies, with an emphasis on print culture, intellectual history, transnationalism, and Black women writers. Her research and teaching focuses on material culture, bibliography and book history, geography, and the public humanities.
Lee’s work has been supported by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University. Her first book project, “Abolition Property”: Speculation and the Value of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, studies the aesthetic relationship between anti-slavery activism and Black calls for reparations across the antebellum and postbellum period.
Research Interests
Early and 19th Century American Literature; African American Literature and Culture; Material Culture and Book History; Women’s and Gender Studies; Geography; Intellectual History; Public Humanities
Publications
“Mary Ann Shadd Cary in Mexico.” Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Edited by Kristin Moriah. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. 57-76.
“‘Sister, wasn’t it good’: Archival Gestures, Mutual Witness and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival.” Early American Literature 57.3 (2022): 857-871.
“The Emigrationist Turn in Black Anti-Colonizationist Sentiment.” American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828. Edited by Greta LaFleur and William Huntting Howell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 204-230.
Forthcoming Publications
“The Black Arts Movement.” Phillis Wheatley (Peters) in Context. Edited by April C. E. Langley and Wendy Raphael Roberts. Cambridge University Press (in press).