Katherine Turner

Professor of English 540-887-7059
Katherine Turner

BA, University of Oxford (Balliol College); MPhil, PhD, University of Oxford

Dr. Katherine Turner, professor of English, teaches courses in British Literature and women’s writing, and the English Major Seminar. She previously taught at the University of Oxford in England, where she worked within the university as well for a number of American JYA programs (Butler, NCSU, Sarah Lawrence, Williams).

Dr. Turner holds several degrees (BA, MPhil and PhD) from the University of Oxford. Her main areas of academic interest are the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she has worked particularly on travel writing, women’s writing, and eighteenth-century poetry. She is interested in the ways in which literary texts intersect with other cultural forms (like the visual arts and journalism) so as to intervene in issues of public controversy such as poverty, women’s education, marriage and divorce, and the slave trade.

Dr. Turner has edited Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, A Sentimental Journey, for Broadview Press (a press dedicated to providing annotated texts for university students and scholars). Her essay on “Women Travel Writers, 1750-1830″ has appeared in  The History of British Women Writers, 1750-1830, edited by Jacqueline Labbe for Palgrave Macmillan. She has written the entry on “Travel Narrative” for the  Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789 and the entry on Thomas Gray for Oxford Handbooks Online, and is currently working on William Cowper and news.