Karah M. Mitchell

American literature from beginnings to 1914

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Karah Mitchell's research focuses on American literature from its beginnings to 1914, with special attention given to educational practices and literature's role in shaping how readers understood animals, the natural environment, and what it means to be human. Since 2015, she has taught a number of courses on different subjects, including pre-1865 American literature, animals in literature, poetry, science writing, and composition.

Her current book project, Primary Lessons: Animals, Children, and Human(e) Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, investigates how materials written for and by children generated, consolidated, and sometimes questioned “humane” values that continue to shape animal and human lives today. Work by historians has considered how the nineteenth-century United States witnessed enormous developments in humane education and animal welfare initiatives—developments that ultimately influenced how we interact with animals today and that continue to be inculcated into children from a young age. Primary Lessons contributes new knowledge to the field of Americanist literary studies by demonstrating how and why literature—and specifically children’s literature—profoundly shaped these historical developments in animal welfare and humane education. While Mitchell focuses on the United States, her project also considers the transnational dimensions of nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse. Her archival research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society, and her most recent scholarship has been published in American Literature (Duke University Press) and is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau.