Women's Studies Affiliate Faculty
Annette KolodnyPh.D., College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture
Dr. Kolodny is a College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture. Her work focuses on issues of gender difference in responses to the frontier, with a special emphasis on multicultural confrontations on the American frontiers. Her books include The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in Americn Life and Letters (1975) and The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984). She also specializes in feminist literary criticism and theory and American women writers, especially the colonial period through 1860. Her books and essays have garnered numerous awards both in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. In 1998, she was the first woman to be named an Honored Scholar by the Division on Early American Literature in the Modern Language Association. As a result of her experience in administration as Dean of the College of Humanities from 1988-1993, Dr. Kolodny now also writes about higher education issues and works with schools across the country on effecting positive change on campus. In 1998, Duke University Press published Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century.