Biography
Michelle Kohler is an Associate Professor of English with research and teaching interests in 19th-century American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental studies. She is author of Miles of Stare: Transcendentalism and the Problem of Literary Vision in Nineteenth-Century America (U of Alabama P, 2014), which studies the historical emergence and influence of the American transcendentalists' strained visual metaphors for writing and traces their subsequent treatments in the work of other 19th-century American writers, including Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Howells, Winnemucca, and Jewett. She is also editor of The New Emily Dickinson Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019). Her essays on Emily Dickinson, Sarah Winnemucca, and other 19th-century American writers have appeared in ESQ, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Nineteenth-Century Literature, American Literary Realism, Arizona Quarterly, and A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2016).
She is currently working on a new book about Dickinson and mid-19th-century American constructions of time and timekeeping.