Assistant Professor of English

Norman Mayer Room 237
Telephone: (504) 862-8178
Fax: (504)862-8958
E-mail:mkohler@tulane.edu

Michelle Kohler specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, with a particular interest in Emily Dickinson's engagement with cultural discourses such as Transcendentalism, Civil War rhetoric, and post-Darwinian evolutionary debates. Kohler's essays (on Dickinson, William Dean Howells, Sarah Winnemucca, vision and literary form, and medieval comedy) have appeared or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, The Emily Dickinson Journal, American Literary Realism, and The Chaucer Review.Her current book project studies the historical emergence and influence of the Transcendentalists' peculiar, problematic visual metaphor for writing and traces its subsequent fate in the hands of other nineteenth-century American writers, including Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Howells.