Alyson J. Kiesel
Alyson J. Kiesel
- Ruth Maxwell Distinguished Professor of English; Professor of English
Alyson Kiesel specializes in nineteenth-century British Literature. She earned a B.A. in English from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from New York University.
Before coming to Carthage, Professor Kiesel was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University, where she taught in the English Department and in the Core Curriculum.
Her research and teaching interests include the Victorian novel and the entwined histories of science and literary realism. She regularly teaches Introduction to Literary Studies, British Literary Traditions II, Literature in Its Time II: “Victorians Gone Wild,” and the Senior Thesis Seminar. She also teaches courses on Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Critical Theory.
Professor Kiesel is currently at work on a long-term project studying representations of natural historical pursuits (like aquarium-keeping, insect-collecting, and botanical drawing) in Victorian fictions. She recently received a Faculty Research and Development Grant to continue this research in Britain. She joined the Carthage faculty in 2011.