Kate Marshall

Biography

I am a teacher and scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, narrative, and the novel. I work with the history of the novel and genre to unearth significant but sometimes unexpected locations for understanding contemporary problems. My first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), described the early twentieth century communications systems in media and architecture that prefigured our contemporary preoccupations with infrastructure. Corridor received the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture from the Media Ecology Association. More recently, in Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (2023), I look back on the first two decades of twenty-first century cultural production to develop a history of the strange narrators populating contemporary literary fiction. Novels by Aliens appeared in a full-page feature review in The Washington Post.

I am currently writing a book about reading novellas now, provisionally titled Time Enough at Last. In it, I ask whether the contemporary rise of the short form novel can be understood in contexts that reach beyond the perceived crisis of attention. I also conduct experiments in analysis, from reading 40 novellas in 40 days, to timed comparisons of novella reading, to other aesthetic encounters with duration, such as watching plays or listening to sonatas.

I have edited the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press for 10 years with Loren Glass, and serve on the board of managing editors for American Quarterly. I have been a member of the steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a transformative prison education program run in partnership with Holy Cross College, since 2013. I am also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, and have received the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair (2019) and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Award (2025) for my teaching there.