Department of English

Kim Emery’s current work explores the integration of practices and values more typically associated with for-profit private business into the structures that organize higher education, asking in particular how recent humanities scholarship may help us to understand the effects of this phenomenon. Her current book project, Homo Academia, draws on queer theory and philosophical pragmatism to illuminate continuities between the liberal-humanist tradition of US higher education and its increasingly neoliberal incarnations, and seeks to complicate more narrowly economic critiques by addressing their normative dimensions. She has published on these topics in venues including Works & Days, Cultural Logic, Profession, Thought & Action, and Academe Online, receiving the Democracy in Higher Education Award from the National Education Association in 2009. Her first book, The Lesbian Index: Pragmatism and the Literature of Lesbian Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century United States (SUNY 2002), traces the ways in which fictional representations of female homosexuality intersected with actual historical contexts over the course of the 20^th century to inform contemporary understandings of lesbian identity.

Dr. Emery teaches a variety of courses in US literatures and cultures, queer and feminist theories, LGBTQ writing, and speech-act theory/pragmatism/performativity. She is a member and former chapter president of United Faculty of Florida at the University of Florida, and an affiliate of UF’s Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research.

Professor Emery’s CV