Katherine Kearns – författare

Teaching is an essential skill in becoming a faculty member in any institution of higher education. Yet how is that skill actually acquired by graduate students? Teaching as if Learning Matters collects first-person narratives from graduate students and new PhDs that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the key issues that graduate students face as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught. Featuring contributions from over thirty graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Indiana University, Teaching as if Learning Matters allows these students to explore this topic from their own unique perspectives. They reflect on the importance of teaching to them personally and professionally, telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education.

Teaching is an essential skill in becoming a faculty member in any institution of higher education. Yet how is that skill actually acquired by graduate students? Teaching as if Learning Matters collects first-person narratives from graduate students and new PhDs that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the key issues that graduate students face as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught. Featuring contributions from over thirty graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Indiana University, Teaching as if Learning Matters allows these students to explore this topic from their own unique perspectives. They reflect on the importance of teaching to them personally and professionally, telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education.

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminising of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatises as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations - to be manly and to be a poet - inform his entire poetics. Rather than approaching Frost's poetry with the methods and assumptions of deconstruction in mind, this book finds that Frost himself forces a deconstructive reading: his unstable ironies, his complexities and his manipulations of form are designed precisely to produce the conviction that any suggestion of significance is arbitrary and personal. The study unites biography, psychology and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.

Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism argues for realism as a genre committed to depicting the imperilled ecological system of soul and society. More specifically: realism, Kearns argues, suggests to its readers that social and political and economic reforms are inextricably tied to spiritual well being. In the process of trying to communicate that suggestion, realism enters into a kind of considerate conversation with its readers which - through the slippage endemic to language - rapidly works to destabilise, even undermine, its own assumptions. Thus realism, in addition to bearing the burden of its own reformist agenda and the duty of character-enactment within a restricted environment, is charged with an alternative energy which can be seen at the same time to disrupt and to enrich its generic, formal bounds. She explores these concepts through five British and American novels - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Blithedale Romance, Hard Times and The Awakening.

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite reads Frost's poetry within a theoretical perspective generated, but not limited by feminist analysis, and it evaluates Frost's persistent feminising of poetic language in ways that he typically dramatises as both erotic and humiliating. Kearns examines how Frost's dual and potentially conflicting obligations - to be manly and to be a poet - inform his entire poetics. Rather than approaching Frost's poetry with the methods and assumptions of deconstruction in mind, this book finds that Frost himself forces a deconstructive reading: his unstable ironies, his complexities and his manipulations of form are designed precisely to produce the conviction that any suggestion of significance is arbitrary and personal. The study unites biography, psychology and feminism in creating an adept and imaginative instrument of interpretation.

Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism argues for realism as a genre committed to depicting the imperilled ecological system of soul and society. More specifically: realism, Kearns argues, suggests to its readers that social and political and economic reforms are inextricably tied to spiritual well being. In the process of trying to communicate that suggestion, realism enters into a kind of considerate conversation with its readers which - through the slippage endemic to language - rapidly works to destabilise, even undermine, its own assumptions. Thus realism, in addition to bearing the burden of its own reformist agenda and the duty of character-enactment within a restricted environment, is charged with an alternative energy which can be seen at the same time to disrupt and to enrich its generic, formal bounds. She explores these concepts through five British and American novels - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, The Blithedale Romance, Hard Times and The Awakening.

Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate is one of the first collections to explore PhD career versatility within higher education. The twenty-three contributors represent diverse disciplines, institution types, professional roles, and intersectional identities. Each thoughtful and personal essay explores firsthand what it means to remain in higher education, yet not in the traditional role of a professor. Topics include establishing new career paradigms, well-being and work-life balance, blended roles and identities, and professional work around advocacy and inclusion. Unifying the essays is the idea that career diversity is intertwined with other diversity discourse, yielding a broad-based but critical examination of careers in higher education administration.Though the doctoral landscape continues to change, a self-determined, values-driven attitude remains essential. This book offers powerful insight into cultural and structural barriers that inhibit institutional transformation and obscure the real range of PhD futures. Frank about both challenges and opportunities, these essays reveal how letting go of "track" thinking opens a constellation of possibilities and many paths to meaningful work and a fulfilling life.