Mary Kuhn
Associate Professor of English
Bryan Hall 409
Office Hours: T/Th 2-3:30 and by appointment.
Class Schedule: T/Th 9:30-10:45 and 11:00-12:15
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:
"Toxic Object Lessons," Caring Futures conference, Paris, FR
"Plants and the Home," Prada Frames symposium, Milan, IT
"Paints and Pesticides," C19 Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biannual Conference, Pasadena, CA
"Cosmopolitan Weeds: Lessons from the 19th Century Garden," Garden Ecologies symposium, Rice University School of Architecture
“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
