Dr. Karen Poremski

Contact Information

Office: Sturges 307
Phone: 740-368-3576
E-mail: kmporems@owu.edu

Specialty

American literature before 1900, 19th-century and contemporary Native American literature, women’s literature

Education

Ph.D., Emory University
M.A., San Francisco State University
B.A., University of Maryland-College Park

Biography

Professor Poremski’s teaching and research focus particularly on early American literature and culture from the contact period through the nineteenth century. Her dissertation work studied captivity narratives—stories of settlers taken prisoner by natives—and argued that several U.S. authors between the Revolution and the Civil War used the tropes of captivity to change the cultural discourse about race, gender, and nationhood. She is engaged in a new project examining the ways in which American authors wrote about land—including the territory that became Ohio—just after the Revolution, and how the debate around land continues in contemporary Native American writing and activism. She teaches composition, American literature (before 1900), women’s literature, and Native American literature.

Courses Taught

ENG 105, Freshman Writing Seminar
ENG 150, Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG 226, American Images
ENG 266, Women’s Literature in English
ENG 278, Native American Literature
ENG 310, Writing for the Workplace
ENG 360, Early American Literature
ENG 362, 19th-Century American Literature

Major Publications

Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom.  A Play by Susanna Haswell Rowson, edited and introduced by Jennifer L. Margulis and Karen M. Poremski (Copley Publishing, 2000).

Roads to Reconciliation: Conflict and Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Amy Benson Brown (M. E. Sharpe, 2005).

* Note: You will need the free Adobe Reader software to view/print PDF files. Click the “Get Adobe Reader” icon to begin the download process.