Kristen Renzi

Kristen Renzi teaches and researches in the areas of Victorian and transatlantic 19th century literature, transatlantic modern literature, poetry, literature and science, performance studies, queer and feminist theory, embodiment studies, visual media, and creative writing.

Professor Renzi teaches courses in Victorian and transatlantic literature, the history of poetry, feminist critical theory, women’s literature, and literature and the moral imagination. She also regularly offers a methods workshop in English literature, offers flagged courses in Gender and Diversity Studies and Diversity Flagged courses, as well as first year seminar courses. Her scholarly work treats representations of embodiment of those that mainstream culture marks as "other": women, racial/sexual minorities, immigrants, and ambiguously sexed/gendered individuals. She also directs Xavier’s program in Gender and Diversity Studies, which offers both a major and a minor.

Her recently published book,  An Ethic of Innocence: Pragmatism, Modernity, and Women's Choice Not to Know (SUNY University Press, 2019), explores the persistence of the trope of female innocence across a wide range of transatlantic literary and cultural sites from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In doing so, she offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature.

Professor Renzi's other scholarly essays have been published in or are forthcoming from critical collections such as Suturing the Divide: Victorian and Modernist Literature and Periodicals (forthcoming); American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity (2018); Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations (2017); Feminist Formations (2018); Modernism/modernity (2015); SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism (2013), and ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2012).

Links and information about these and other of Dr. Renzi’s projects can be found at her professional website: www.kristenrenzi.com

A monograph of her poetry, The God Games and Other Voices, was published in 2017 by the Main Street Rag Press; her poetry has also appeared in the journals Illya's Honey, Monday Night, Existere: A Journal of Art and Literature, Marsh Hawk Review, and Exit 7 and has been broadcast on the Indiana public radio program, The Poet's Weave.