Dr. Kevin Pelletier

Assistant Professor of English
303-A Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 289-8776

Whether it appears in the fire and brimstone rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, the doomsday paranoia of the Nuclear Age, or the season-to-season calamities of television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the apocalypse has endured in the American popular imagination. My current research project examines the apocalypse as one of America’s foundational conceptual categories. In particular, I consider the ways in which representations of apocalypse help to structure and inform nineteenth-century discourses on race and slavery. By carefully attending to the writings and performances of figures such as Nat Turner, David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Harper, I aim to demonstrate how the apocalypse is a vital, and often inextricable, organizing principle that shapes the way race and slavery are understood in this period.

Teaching:
US Apocalyptic Literature and Culture
American Renaissance
Literature of the American Enlightenment
Representations of Race in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature
Selfhood and Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature
Transatlantic Romanticism
Core: Exploring the Human Experience
Civil War Literature

Research:
Early-American Literature
Apocalyptic Literature and Culture
Race and Slavery

Education:
Ph.D., SUNY Buffalo
M.A., University of Rhode Island

Selected Publications:
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Apocalyptic Sentimentalism,” Literature, Interpretation, Theory (forthcoming).
 
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialistic Theory of Becoming, Review essay, Cultural Critique (Fall 2004).

Awards:
Community-Based Learning Faculty Fellowship, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, University of Richmond, 2009.
 
Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Spring 2007
 
Presidential Fellowship, University at Buffalo, SUNY, 2002-2006.
 
Mark Diamond Research Fellowship, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Summer 2006.

Dissertation Fellowship, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Spring 2006.