K.S. (Kathryn) Roberts, Dr

Academic Employment

University of Groningen        
Senior Lecturer, Program in American Studies, 2021-present
Assistant Professor, Program in American Studies, 2018-2021

Harvard University                
Lecturer, Department of English, 2017
Head Teaching Fellow, Arts & Humanities, 2016-2017

Education

Harvard University                 
Ph.D., English, 2016
M.A., English, 2011

Duke University                      
B.A., English, Summa cum laude, 2007

Recent Grants, Fellowships, and Awards

• Constructive Advanced Thinking Grant, NETIAS, 2023-2025
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow, 2019-2020

Recent Talks

Symposium presentation: "Our Chronopolitics: Intellectual Reproduction in the Post-Crash Academy (‘The McGurl Era?’ Revisited)," Post45 UK, University College Dublin, Ireland, June 17-18, 2026.

Conference talk: "Reading for Utopia: The Residency as Literary and Social Form," Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Literature, University College Dublin, Ireland, June 17-20, 2025.

Research presentation with Bojana Panevska, Angela Serino, Patricia Healy McMeans, and Pau Catà: "How do we live together?" Seminar MIAS-CAT NetIAS, Madrid Institute of Advanced Study, Spain, November 5, 2025.

Invited talk: “Where was Contemporary Literature? Utopia and Precarity in the Residency Novel,” What was Contemporary Literature? Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), September 26-28, 2024.

Research presentation with Sara Strandvad: “Institutionalize yourself! Artist residencies and the pitfalls of self-organizing,” theme group Public Art and the New Common: Integrating perspectives on actors, institutions and structures forming public space, Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund, Sweden, (online) May 2023.

Selected Publications

Review: "The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos by Geneva M. Gano,” American Literary History: Online Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2023, pp. 575–578. doi: 0.1093/alh/ajac273.

Book chapter: Roberts, K. & Strandvad, S., "Creative Ecologies: Proposing a New Framework for 21st-Century Cultural Production from the Case of Artist Residencies," in The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music, edited by Lisa McCormick. Palgrave, 2022.

Book chapter: “The McGurl Era? American Culture, Peak College, and The Program Era,” in Culture²: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Vol. 1, edited by Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre, Transcript, 2022. 

Article: “Our Town, the MacDowell Colony, and the Art of Civic Mediation.” American Literary History, vol. 31, no. 3, 2019, pp. 395–418. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz025.

Book chapter: “Outside Joke: Humorlessness and Masculinity in Richard Wright,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright, edited by Glenda R. Carpio. Cambridge University Press, 2019.