Katherine Biers

Katherine Biers’s teaching and research interests focus on late nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American literature, including drama, theater, and performance. Her first book, Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), challenges the “secularization thesis” of modernity and modernism by tracing a Puritan and Protestant “poetics of the virtual” in writing about technology from Stephen Crane to Gertrude Stein. Her second book, Fragile Realism: Things in Modern Drama (forthcoming from Michigan University Press, 2023), examines how modern dramatists from Anton Chekov to Bertolt Brecht defamiliarize ordinary objects on stage in dialogue with contemporaneous philosophical and artistic treatments of material culture. Her current research focuses on the role of aesthetic education in fostering ecological thinking. She has published articles on American literature and modern drama in Representations, Textual Practice, Modern Drama, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater Survey, and several edited collections. Biers is a recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and was an alternate for an ACLS Fellowship in English and American Literature and a nominee for the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia University. Before coming to NYU, she taught at Columbia University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago.