Karen Waldron
207-801-5727  |  waldron@coa.edu  |  faculty website

Karen Waldron sees herself first and foremost as teacher and mentor. She has been at COA since 1995 and spent ten years as an academic dean before returning to full-time teaching in 2008. Her research on 19th and 20th century American women's and minority literature is highly interdisciplinary and she has a wide diversity of literary, historical, and scientific passions, particularly the exploration of otherness and consciousness in narrative form and the power of language to represent and transform.

Karen received her B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from Hampshire College in 1974, an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts/Boston in 1988, a second M.A. in Women's Studies from Brandeis University in 1993, and the Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis in 1994. Karen earned several teaching fellowships while a graduate student at Brandeis and from 1993 to 1995 she was an adjunct and then visiting faculty member at both Boston College and Brandeis University.

Besides reading, writing, and teaching, Karen gardens when she can, tends the plants in her office, and spends time thinking about psychology, education, religions, social identities, and ecology. She is married to a software architect and the mother of two intelligent and musical sons.

B.A. Hampshire College, 1974
M.A. University of Massachusetts, Boston, 1988
M.A. Brandeis University, 1993
Ph.D. English and American Literature, Brandeis University, 1994

Courses Taught

Tutorial: Faulkner
Tutorial: The Nature of Narrative
Literature, Science, and Spirituality
African American Literature
City/Country: Literary Landscapes 1860-1920
Contemporary Women's Novels
City/Country: American Literary Landscapes 1860-1920 WF
Race and Gender in Southern Africa
Writing Seminar II
Nineteenth Century American Women
Native American Literature
Feminism and Fundamentalism
Tutorial: Virginia Woolf