Mary Kuhn
Assistant Professor of English
Bryan Hall 409
Office Hours: W 12:30-2:30 and by appointment
Class Schedule: T/Th 11:00-12:15 and 2-3:15
Specialties:
19th C American, Environmental Humanities, Literature and Science
Degrees
Ph.D. Boston University 2014
M.A. Boston University 2008
B.A. Yale University 2005
Selected Publications:
The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (February 2023, NYU Press)
"Wild only like myself": Thoreau at Home with Plants" in Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought. Ed. Branka Arsić. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.
"Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy," PMLA. 136.1 (Jan. 2021): 39-54.
“Dickinson and the Politics of Plant Sensibility,” ELH 85.1 (Spring 2018): 41-70.
“Loving the Plant that Saves You,” Common-place. 17.4 (Fall 2017)
“Garden Variety: Botany and Multiplicity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Abolitionism,” American Literature, 87.3 (September 2015), 489-516.
Selected Awards/Fellowships:
UVA Alumni Board of Visitors Teaching Award, 2023
3Cavaliers Grant, University of Virginia, 2021-22
Mead Endowment Honored Faculty, University of Virginia, 2018-2019
First Book Institute, Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State, 2018
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, MIT, 2015-2016
San Andreas Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2014
ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2013-2014
Recent Presentations:
“Approaching Olmsted’s Forests,” FLO@200, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2022
“Paris Green and London Purple: The Cultures of Late 19th Century Biocide,” C19 Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biannual Conference, Miami, FL (presented virtually), 2022
“Indecorous Plants,” C19 Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biannual Conference, Virtual format, 2020
“Thoreau at Home with Plants,” American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Washington, DC, 2019
“Frederick Douglass’ Agricultural Politics,” American Studies Association (ASA), Atlanta, GE, 2018
"Chesnutt and the Turpentine Pine," C19 Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biannual Conference, Albuquerque, NM, 2018.
"Structuring the Imagination Under the Banner of Science," History of Science Society (HSS), Toronto, CAN, 2017.
"Intelligent Plants: 19th-Century Botany and 21st-Century Politics," Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), Detroit, MI, 2017.
