Biography
Kate Adams is Associate Professor of English and the inaugural Martha McCarty Kimmerling Chair in Women’s Literature. Her courses focus on nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture, women’s writing, African American literature, feminist and critical race theory, and literary theory. Her teaching has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Outstanding Newcomb-Tulane College Faculty Award and Weiss Presidential Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2026.
Adams is the author of Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women’s Life Writing (Oxford 2009), which analyzes how conceptions of privacy changed over the course of the nineteenth century, posed against the invasive dynamics of market capitalism and mediated by race and gender. Her second monograph, Reconstructing Value: Cotton Culture and Blackness after Emancipation (UNC 2027), focuses on Black writing about cotton’s global political economy from the Civil War era into the late 1920s. Reading literary texts alongside minstrel performance, exposition culture, stereography, children’s literature, labor contracts, and agricultural manuals, the study shows how Black writers used cotton to analyze and reimagine racial capitalism. Adams’s essays and articles appear in numerous edited collections and journals such as American Literary History, J19, ESQ, NEQ, Arizona Quarterly, Hypatia, and NWSA Journal. Her research has been supported by organizations that include the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.
Adams is editor (and previously associate editor) of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She and Professor Jacquelyne Thoni Howard co-direct the public humanities website, This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books, a digital recovery project based on the Woman’s Literary Exhibit at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair.