Kate Marshall

Biography

My teaching and research are focused on fiction, narrative, and the novel from the late nineteenth century to the present. I am particularly interested in how genre and media work in the novel as cultural technologies and techniques.

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. In novels by Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, and C. P. Snow, for example, I show how pipes and ventilation shafts, the contagious logics of the 1918 pandemic, or the corridors of power all converge in the early stages of an infrastructural modernity ascendant in the century. 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, 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. I explore the convergence of desires for nonhuman narration in theory and in fiction—in new materialist fantasies of object agency and in the surprisingly weird interruptions of literary realism—to account for genre’s appeal across cultural forms in these decades, and reveal their antecedents in the early twentieth century weird, in the theory of realism, and in the late nineteenth century concept of pseudoscience and its destinies. I focus on three key contemporary blended genres and their histories: weird tales, cosmic realism, and pseudoscience fiction. Novels by Aliens appeared in a full-page feature review in The Washington Post.

I have recently completed a book on reading novellas now, Time Enough at Last: The Novella in the Age of Attention. 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. In addition to surveying the rich landscape of the contemporary novella, I read several key texts from the history and theory of the genre. I also conduct experiments in analysis, from reading 40 novellas in 40 days to timed comparisons of novella reading to other aesthetic experiments with duration, such as watching plays or listening to sonatas. I am also working on several related collaborative projects supporting the contemporary study of the novella.

I have edited the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press for over 10 years with Loren Glass, publishing field-defining criticism on literature and culture after 1945. I teach media, technology, and contemporary thought in a variety of contexts, ranging from transhistorical encounters with genre, to classes on emerging technology, to graduate writing workshops dedicated to work in the public humanities. I am also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, teaching at the Vermont mountain campus, and have received the Frank and Eleanor Griffiths Chair (2019) and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Award (2025) for my teaching there.

I am the Founding Director of the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, a liberal arts research institute dedicated to advancing liberal arts research with programs including grants, fellowships, collaborative research opportunities for faculty and students, and a humanities center with programming bringing liberal arts research into public conversations. I also serve as Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives in the College of Arts and Letters, and on the executive leadership team at Notre Dame Research.