• Karen Elizabeth Bishop
  • Bishop, Karen Elizabeth
  • ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
  • Undergraduate Director
  • Personal Website
  • Specialty: 20th-21st century literatures in Spanish, English, and French; lyric; form; geopoetics; narratology; close reading; translation theory and practice; human rights; torture; theories of space and place; architecture and urban humanities.
  • Degree: B.A. (College of Creative Studies, University of California), M.A., Ph.D. California (Santa Barbara)
  • AB- 5179

Karen Elizabeth Bishop is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative. Her research and teaching interests include modern poetry and narrative, translation, form, lyric theory, poethics, ecolyric, book arts, narratology, close reading, human rights, torture and enforced disappearance, memory studies, architectural theory, the geohumanities, and cartography. 

 

Published works include The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY UP, 2020); Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy (Routledge, 2016); a forthcoming special issue on “Translational Poetics” for the Romanic Review (co-edited with Teresa Villa-Ignacio); and articles in the Journal of the Society of Architectural HistoriansTranslation Review, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

 

Her creative work includes the deering hour (Ornithopter Press, 2021), as well as forthcoming or recent poetry in Lana TurnerBennington ReviewPoetry Northwest, and New Writing Scotland, and translations at Aktion Focus from Action Books and Modern Poetry in Translation. Read reviews of the deering hour here.

 

She runs (with David Sherman) The Elegy Project, a public humanities initiative that publishes and distributes broadsides of elegies for strangers in public spaces. Read their piece on elegy during the pandemic at The Washington Post.

 

In 2022-23, she co-directed (with Anjali Nerlekar) the Scale Seminar for the Center for Cultural Analysis, and has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Comparative Literature since 2022. 

 

Professor Bishop has chaired the MLA Executive Committee on Literatures of the US in Languages Other than English, and served as representative on Academic Labour to the MLA’s Delegate Assembly.

 

Professor Bishop’s research has been supported by the Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room, the American Council of Learned Societies the Rutgers Research Council, the Rutgers Center for Latin American Studies, and Finland’s BioArts Society. Before joining Rutgers, she was Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard, where she twice received the Derek Bok Center Certificate in Teaching Excellence. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, where she was awarded the President’s Dissertation Fellowship.

 

She maintains an online abode at www.kebishop.org.