Kenneth Salzer

  • Teaching Associate Professor

Kenneth Salzer (he/him) began teaching English at the University of Pittsburgh in 2010 and currently holds the position of Teaching Associate Professor. He received his doctorate from the University of Rochester in 2002. His dissertation, “Cross Purposes: Transvestic Figures in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture,” examines real and fictional examples of cross-dressers who superficially and strategically altered not only their gender but often their race and/or class as well.

Courses Taught

American Literature

Queer/Transgender Literature

Sexuality & Representation

Apocalypse Science Fiction

Women & Literature

Introduction to Critical Reading

Detective Fiction

History of Literary Criticism

Speculative Fiction

The Gothic Imagination

Emergence of Modern America

Imagining Social Justice

Senior Seminar (Edgar Allan Poe)

Sexuality & Representation

Apocalypse

Science Fiction

Women & Literature

Introduction to Critical Reading

Detective Fiction

History of Literary Criticism

The Gothic Imagination

Emergence of Modern America

Imagining Social Justice

Senior Seminar (Edgar Allan Poe)

Representative Publications

“An Exclusive Engagement: The Personal and Professional Negotiations of Vivia.” In E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering the Career of a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (University of Tennessee Press, 2012)

“Great Exhibitions: Ellen Craft on the British Abolitionist Stage.” In Transatlantic Women: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe (University Press of New England, 2012)

“Call Her Ishmael: E. D. E. N. Southworth, Robert Bonner, and the ‘Experiment’ of Self-Made.” In Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)

Research Interests

American Slave Narratives and Novels, Captivity and Seduction in Early American Literature, Whiteness as Terror, Cross-Dressing and “Passing,” Writing on the Body (tattoos, scars, fingerprints, etc.), The Female Suicide