Kristi Cassaro

Kristi-Lynn Cassaro specializes in American literature and cultural studies, centered on the 19th-century, with bearings in philosophy and history of science. Her research interests connect pragmatism, consciousness studies, ecopoetics, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, gender and sexuality, James Baldwin, and critical race and ethnic studies with posthumanism’s ambition to change the way we form and speak to questions of identity.

Cassaro has developed this transdisciplinarity into several original courses, including American Exceptionalism, The Soul of the Nation?, and The Discovery Paper, which was granted the Diana Colbert Award for Innovative Teaching by her doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned her Ph.D. in English in 2018 and is currently working to expand her dissertation, The Geometry of Pragmatism, into a book project. She holds a B.A. in English from Barnard.