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Faculty and Staff Profiles

Kathlene McDonald, Ph.D.

Department Chair, IAS Chair

School/Division

Center for Worker Education

Department

Office

25 Broadway 7-63

p: (212) 925-6625 x265

f: (212) 925-0963

e: kmcdonald@ccny.cuny.edu

  • Profile

    Kathy McDonald is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.  Her work considers the relationship between class, culture, and politics in twentieth-century United States literature.  McDonald’s first book, Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture, examines the cultural work of women writers on the Left in the United States in the years immediately following World War II.  She argues that these cultural works anticipate issues about women’s cultural and ideological oppression and the intersections of gender, race, and class that would become central tenants of feminist literary criticism and black feminist criticism in the 1970s and ‘80s.  She has also published articles in various journals and edited volumes, including Black Scholar, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Against the Current, Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States, Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice, and Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society.  In 2008, she guest edited a special issue of Working USA, on women and labor.  She is currently at work on an anthology of women writers on the Left from the post-World War II era.  For her next project, she will move into the field of memoir and autobiography, exploring the role of memoir writing in creating home for writers displaced due to political or ethnic violence.  She has received numerous grants and awards to support her research, including several PSC-CUNY Research Awards, a CCNY Presidential Research Award, the Margaret Storrs Grierson Travel-to-Collections Fund award, and the Lillian S. Robinson Scholar award.

  • Education

    PhD, English, University of Maryland

    MA, English, State University of New York at Binghamton

    BA, Women's Studies, Colgate University

  • Courses Taught

    Autobiography Seminar, Advanced Seminar in Autobiography, Book Talk: Writers on Writing, American Literature since World War II, Women and Work, Short Story, Introduction to Women's Studies, and the Core Humanities

  • Publications

    Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture (forthcoming Spring 2012, University Press of Mississippi): see http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1481

    "Hitler's Bestiary from the Inside."  Rev. of In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson.  Against the Current Jan.-Feb. 2012.

    "Nikki Giovanni."  The Literary Encyclopedia.  15 August 2011. [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1759]

    “Organizing at the Margins: Women Shape the Labor Movement.”  Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 11.4 (2008): 409-12.

    “Postwar Left Feminism and Antifascist Resistance in the Cultural Work of Martha Dodd.”  Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States.  Ed. Josh Lukin.  Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008: 41-61.

    “Labor Culture.”  Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice.  Eds. Gary L. Anderson and Kathryn Herr.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage P, 2007.  815-17.

    “Nikki Giovanni.”  African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook.  Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson.  Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002.  151-55.

    “Paule Marshall’s Critique of Capitalism and Cold War Ideology: Brown Girl, Brownstones as a Resistant Working-Class Text.”  Black Scholar 30.2 (2000): 26-33.

    “Talking Trash, Talking Back: Resistance to Stereotypes in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.”  Women’s Studies Quarterly 26.1-2 (1998): 15-25.

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