Professor of English
Bondurant C-135
University, MS 38677
662-915-5793
kraber@olemiss.edu
Karen Raber is a Professor of English, and works primarily on Renaissance and early modern ecocriticism and animal studies. Her work arises directly out of the circumstances and interests of her non-academic life—she is an avid horsewoman, competing at the FEI levels in dressage, and she keeps her horses at home along with a dog, six cats, and whatever wildlife has decided to move in for the season.
She has coedited two volumes of essays in the field, one with Treva J. Tucker called The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World (2005), and the other with Ivo Kamps and Thomas Hallock called Early Modern Ecocriticism: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (2009). She wrote the first retrospective essay on Renaissance Ecocriticism for English Literary Renaissance (2007) and is the author of several articles and book chapters on related subjects. She has completed a monograph on the problems raised for Renaissance writers and thinkers trying to establish boundaries between animal and human by the shared fact of embodiment: Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press 2013). She is editing a series at Routledge called Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture, with first volumes on birds in Shakespeare, race and animality in American literature, and plants in contemporary poetry. Forthcoming titles cover war in early modern England, Victorian animals, Renaissance weather, Turkish animals in literature, posthuman robots and automata, and the sport of angling. She has edited a collection called Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater with Monica Mattfeld (Penn State Press 2017). She is currently editing a collection on Shakespeare and Animals for Routledge, and writing the Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare and Animals, as well as working on a monograph called “Animals at the Table: Making Meat in the Early Modern World.”
Education:
Ph.D., University of California
B.A., Yale University
Courses Taught:
The courses Karen Raber teaches for ENVS credit are ENG 447, Animals in Literature, and ENG 483, Renaissance Literature and the Environment.