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Katy Chiles

Katy Chiles teaches and writes about African-American and Native American literature, early American literature and culture, and critical race theory.  Her current research focuses on how late eighteenth-century beliefs about the potential mutability of the racialized body structures the way that early American literary texts characterize racial difference.  She teaches courses such as Major Black Writers, the Antebellum Black Atlantic, and Black American Literature and Aesthetics.  Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship program, and the American Philosophical Society. 

Selected Publications:

Representative articles

  • “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley’s Early America.”  PMLA 123.5 (2008):  1398-1417.
  • “Within and without the Raced Nation:  Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or the Huts of America.”  American Literature 80.2 (2008):  323-52.
  • “Blackened Irish and Brownfaced Amerindians:  American Whiteness in Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon.”  Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 31.2 (Winter 2004):  28-50.

Reviews and Entries

  • Review of A Hideous Monster of the Mind:  American Race Theory in the Early Republic, by Bruce Dain.  Early American Literature 43.2 (2008):  511-16.
  • “John Marrant.”  The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature.  Eds. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey. Vol. 3. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.  1034-35.
  • Review of Spiritual Interrogations:  Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing, by Katherine Clay Bassard.  Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21.2 (Fall 2002):  411-14.

 

 

 


Katy Chiles

Contact Information

Katy Chiles
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Office: (865) 974-6945
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: kchiles1@utk.edu

Education

B.A., University of Kentucky
M.A., Ph.D., Northwestern University

Research

African-American literature, early American literature, and critical race studies