Lara Kees

Instructor
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

225-578-2988
[email protected]
212-Q Allen Hall

Biography

Lara Kees is an Instructor in English. Specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, Dr. Kees has focused primarily on formal analysis, considering how writers’ formal choices reveal what they inherit and modify from culture and education. Her doctoral research concerned the British Victorian poet Christina Rossetti and how her adaptation of Romantic poetics dramatized her preoccupation with, especially, the Oxford Movement theology of her time. Dr. Kees’s published work on Charlotte Brontë’s _Jane Eyre_ considers how Brontë used abolitionist rhetoric, especially the eighteenth-century understanding of “sympathy,” to articulate Jane Eyre’s (and Brontë’s) meritocratic philosophy. Dr. Kees has taught at the college level for over twenty years, plus a three-year stint in high-school teaching. Her teaching includes composition and literature in English: British literature from the medieval period to the twentieth century; a survey of American literature; genre studies of fiction and poetry in English (not exclusively British); themed interdisciplinary courses on the medieval, modernist, and contemporary worlds (courses which included consideration of painting, film, religion, and music); and a themed freshman seminar on the idea of “time” as it has engaged poets, philosophers, physicists, and musicians.

Area(s) of Interest

19th-century British literature, poetry and poetics, 20th century British literature