Dawn Keetley

Dawn Keetley
Professor of English
(610) 758-3307
321A Drown Hall
Education: 
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1994

 

On Dawn Keetley's current research, July, 2019: https://www2.lehigh.edu/news/the-deeper-meaning-of-horror

Dawn Keetley is a Professor of English. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in December 1994, with fields in women's literature, feminist theory, and nineteenth-century American literature.  

After spending several years writing about nineteenth-century U.S. women's autobiography (for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writersa/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and American Transcendental Quarterly), then about fictional accounts of murderous women (for Emerson Society Quarterly, American Quarterly, and REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature), and finally about men's homicidal jealousy and envy (for Legacy, Early American Literature, Poe Studies, and the Journal of Social History), Keetley’s most recent publication is Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), a cultural history of the conditions that led a fourteen-year-old boy to torture and murder several small children between 1872-1874. Keetley has also published articles about contemporary Gothic and horror fiction, film and television, including on Stephen King's Cell, George Romero's Dead films, FX’s American Horror Story, AMC’s The Walking Dead, and Showtime’s Dexter. She is currently working on a monograph and a collection of essays (with Ruth Heholt) on Folk Horror for the University of Wales Press.


Keetley also runs a website, Horror Homeroom, with Elizabeth Erwin and Gwen Hofmann about all aspects of horror. It can be found at:  http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/

Dawn Keetley is editing a series for Lehigh University Press called Critical Conversations in Horror Studies. For more information, please check out the linked flier.

Keetley is most recently the editor of Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020). https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214275.html

Keetley is author of Making a Monster:  Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).  http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/making-monster

Co-editor with Matthew Wynn Sivils, Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge, 2017) https://www.routledge.com/Ecogothic-in-Nineteenth-Century-American-Literature/Keetley-Sivils/p/book/9781138206458

Co-editor, with Angela Tenga, of Plant Horror:  Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), including an introduction titled "Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?" (pp. 1-30).http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137570628

Co-editor, with Elizabeth Erwin, of The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland 2018). https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-politics-of-race-gender-and-sexua...

Editor of "We're All Infected":  Essays on AMC's "The Walking Dead" and the Fate of Human. (McFarland 2014) https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/were-all-infected/

Her profile and publications can be found at academia.edu

 

 

Research Interests: 
American literature and culture (specializing in the nineteenth century), the Gothic, Horror Film and Television