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ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow
Sharon Kunde earned her PhD from the University of California, Irvine. Supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, her first book project, Natural Reading: Race, Place, and Literary Practice from Douglass to Ransom, centers on the racial politics of reading and representing nature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and literary criticism. Examining the ways in which racialized assumptions linking nature and textuality have shaped the discipline of literary studies, her research explores ways to develop anti-colonial practices for reading, researching, and teaching literature. She has published poems and articles with Twentieth-Century Literature, Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ISLE, and other publications. Her poetry chapbook, Year of the Sasquatch, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2022. Kunde holds an MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she has taught English at the middle and high school level in Albania, Mongolia, New York, and Los Angeles. Kunde writes as a recurring guest columnist for W. W. Norton’s K-12 Talk blog. At Duke, she sings with the Duke Chapel’s Vespers Ensemble. More information about her work and public events can be found here.