Mary Kuhn

Assistant Professor of English

Bryan Hall 409

Office Hours: Tuesdays 3:30-4:30, Thursdays 12:30-1:30 and by appointment.
Class Schedule: T/Th 11:00-12:15 and 2:00-3:15
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:
 
 
"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.