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Karen Nelson

Smiling woman seated in front of bookcases and window

Director, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, English
Classics

(301) 405-3185

7751 Alumni Drive (2120B Tawes Hall)
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Research Expertise

Comparative Literature
Early Modern Studies
Women's Literature and Feminist Theory

Curriculum Vitae

Karen Nelson is Director for Research Initiatives in the Center for Literary & Comparative Studies. She also oversees departmental communications and alumni relations. Nelson serves as Editor for the Sixteenth Century Journal.

Recent courses include: 

Presentations for 2024-2025 include papers for the Sixteenth Century Society, October-November 2024, Toronto, Canada, and for Esther Inglis in Contexts and Culture, October 2024, Edinburgh, UK.

Recent Awards: Nelson received a Graduate English Organization faculty service award, May 2024, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, October 2014, and a service to the department award, September 2014, from the College of Arts and Humanities.

Publications include Feminist Circulations: Rhetorical Explorations across Space & Time (Parlour Press, 2021; co-edited with Jessica Enoch and Danielle Griffin); Re-Mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe: Proceedings of the 2010 NEH Summer Institute (online, multimedia, active 2012-2016, with Adele Seeff, Julia Schleck, E. Nathalie Rothman and others, as part of SERAI: Pre-Modern Encounters, at University of Toronto Scarborough);  Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict, Concord (University of Delaware Press, 2013); Masculinities, Violence, Childhood: Attending to Early Modern Women--and Men: Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium, edited with Amy E. Leonard (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2011); Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, edited with Jane Donawerth, Mary Burke, and Linda Dove (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000); various articles, bibliographies, reviews, and biographical entries. Nelson served as book review editor for Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal from its inception in 2006 through its 2010 move to the University of Miami.

Nelson served as associate director for the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland from 1999 through 2010. During that time, the Center organized a variety of interdisciplinary programs and publications for scholars, teachers, and students, including the Attending to Early Modern Women symposium series. Nelson was part of the grant-writing teams that secured funding from such agencies as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland Humanities Council, the Maryland State Department of Education, the Delmas Foundation, and the Kress Foundation.

Foldable Banneker Almanac, generated for ENGL 460, spring 2020.

Education:

Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, May 1998. Major: English Literature. Specialties: Renaissance; Women's Writing
M.A., University of Maryland, College Park, 1992. Major: English Literature
A.B., College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1987. Major: English Literature. Minor: German

Publications

Circulating Feminist Rhetorics: An Introduction

Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Jessica Enoch, Danielle Griffin, Nabila Hijazi, Shirley Logan, Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Karen Nelson, Michele Osherow, Ruth Osorio, Erin Sadlack, Adele Seeff, and Lisa Zimmerelli.

English

Author/Lead: Karen Nelson, Jessica Enoch, Danielle Griffin
Dates:
Article Flyer

The scholars in FEMINIST CIRCULATIONS: RHETORICAL EXPLORATIONS ACROSS SPACE AND TIME work at the nexus of gender, power, and movement to explore the rhetorical nature of circulation, especially considering how women from varying backgrounds and their rhetorics have moved and have been constrained across both space and time. Among the central characters studied in this collection are early modern laborers, letter writers, petitioners, and embroiderers; African American elocutionists, freedom singers, and bloggers; Muslim religious leaders; Quaker suffragists; South African filmmakers; nineteenth-century conduct book writers; and twenty-first-century pop stars. To generate their claims, contributors draw from and make use of a breadth of archival and primary documents: music videos, tweets, petitions, letters, embroidery work, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and made-for-television movies. Authors read these “texts” with scrutiny and imagination, adding distinction to their chapters’ arguments about circulation by zeroing in on specific rhetorical concepts that span from rhetorical agency, cultivation of ethos, and development of rhetorical education to capacities for social networking, collective and collaborative authorship, and kairotic interventions.

Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord

This volume considers women’s roles in the conflicts and negotiations of the early modern world.

English

Author/Lead: Karen Nelson
Dates:
Essays explore the ways gender shapes women’s agency in times of war, religious strife, and economic change. How were conflict and concord gendered in histories, literature, music, and political, legal, didactic, and religious treatises?

Read More about Attending to Early Modern Women: Conflict and Concord

Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women--and Men. Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium.

This interdisciplinary volume includes essays and workshop summaries for the 2006 Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men symposium.

English

Author/Lead: Karen Nelson
Dates:
Essays and workshop summaries are divided into four sections, “Masculinities,” “Violence,” “Childhood,” and “Pedagogies.” Taken together, they considers women’s works, lives, and culture across geographical regions, primarily in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, the Caribbean, and the Islamic world and explore the shift in scholarly understanding of women’s lives and works when they are placed alongside nuanced considerations of men’s lives and works.

Read More about Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women--and Men. Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium.

Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain

Winner of the 2000 Award for Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

English

Author/Lead: Karen Nelson
Dates:
In Tudor and Stuart Britain, women writers were shaped by their culture, but they also helped to shape and reproduce culture through their writing, their patronage, and their networks of family and friends. Through the lens of cultural studies, the editors explore women's material culture, women as agents in reproducing culture, popular culture and women's pamphlets, and women's bodes as inscriptions of culture.

Read More about Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain