Karen Schaller

I am a multi-modal and interdisciplinary feminist researcher specialising in theories and politics of affect, feeling, emotion and embodiment. My work tracks economies and institutions of feeling across 20th and 21st century literary, aesthetic and critical cultures, materialises the biopolitics of academia and distributions of vitality in domestic and institutional scenes, and performs tactics of feminist resistance.

I have published work on twentieth and twenty first century cultures in relation to feminist rage in the asset economy, the politics of love in the contemporary university, the domestic in 21^st century feminist imaginaries, how impolitical feeling shapes the status of critically neglected twentieth century women writers, feeling as a war technology, and the ways economic shifts are (re)shaping gender. I have published and performed work about, and using, experimental methodologies and have a longstanding research practice investigating the relation between the creative and critical including being awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Gold Medal for my post-graduate work on experimental research methodologies. I have two ongoing external research collaborations, one about how late-stage capitalism is (re)shaping gendered sensibilities and subjectivities, and the other responding to the contemporary fascination with, and engagement of, witchcraft for intersectional radical politics.

Speculative Femininities is an ongoing collaboration with Dr Alison Winch, proposing the concept of ‘speculative femininities’ by which we explain how financial speculation provides a model for understanding how late-stage capitalism is (re)shaping gendered sensibilities and subjectivities in order to resolve national economic crises in the shift to an asset economy. It emerges from our work on rage in contemporary culture for our recent article ‘Generating Intimacy: Rage, Female Friendship, and the Heteropatriarchal Household on TV after #MeToo’ (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Volume 50: Number 2, Winter 2025) in which we considered how a taste for rage in contemporary popular culture is bound up with particular kinds of political promise. We argued that the legibility of rage emerges from the specific historical, social and economic forces of the present conjuncture, including increasing precarity and the unequal distribution of assets.

Witching the Institution is an ongoing multi-modal collaboration with Dr Ruth Charnock exploring how witchcraft is being increasingly practiced as a feminist, queer and critical anti-racist methodology fusing literary, aesthetic, and performance modes. We consider how witchcraft is mobilised to create spaces, practices, and embodied affective experiences to configure new kinds of politicised critique, action and world-building. ‘Witching the Institution’ locates witchcraft as an emerging body of intersectional feminist praxis that straddles academic and public audiences, spaces, and knowledge-making and inquiry. Our work has been published in Jane Ward and Soma Chaudhuri’s interdisciplinary edited collection The Witch Studies Reader from Duke University Press (Eds: Jane Ward and Soma Chaudhuri, 2025), which was named by MS Magazine as one of their ‘Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2025’. For reviews, see Witch Studies in the news.

Recent Publications

• 'Not in the Mood: Reading Love in the Contemporary University' in Savage, Dikova, McMahon (Eds), Politics of Care (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2022). I ask about the attachments to, and violences of, love in the academic institution by reading two kinds of critical love scenes, or plots: the humanities scholars’ loving attachment to their discipline in our cultural imaginary, and the rhetoric of love in contemporary defences of the humanities. Reading a Donna Tartt's The Secret History, AS Byatt's Possession, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and Luca Guadagnino's film Call me by your name, I argue that if we are to imagine new critical moods -- and new critical modes -- perhaps we must be prepared to relinquish love.
• ‘Feeling Political: Elizabeth Bowen in the 1940s’ in Tew and White (Eds), The 1940s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction ( Bloomsbury Academic Publishing: London, 2022). No longer neglected, Elizabeth Bowen has emerged as a significant twentieth century British writer. Here I consider how her work in the 1940s can be situated both in relation to the period, and to her literary and critical inheritances, and argue that her primary concern in the period is with the politics of feeling, and how it is being shaped by the government as a resource for the war.
• 'The True Heart: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Impolitics of Love' in Textual Practice (April 2021). Here I situate Warner's critical neglect in terms of the ugliness of love that her novel imagines. I argue that Warner’s novel asks us to rethink our critical attachments to love. 
• ‘Feminist Dwellings: Imagining the Domestic in the Twenty-first-century Literary Novel’ in Cooke, J. Ed, New Feminist Studies: Twenty-first-century Critical Interventions (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, December 2020). In this chapter I observe feminism’s refusal, in the twenty first century, to relinquish the domestic as a site or language for imagining feminist possibility and practice, in order to read the domestic in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011) and Miranda July’s First Bad Man (2015). 

• ‘Lipo-literacy’ in Thorkelson and Mason-Deese (Eds), A Day is a Struggle (2021). This creative-critical piece, the beginning of a chapter in my book investiates how the discipline of literary scholarship is entangled with body-work. Reading fatness and analysis as imbricated plot-lines that render epistemic status a matter of embodiment, I work to produce lipo-literacy as a paradoxical position for the fat woman academic whose literary discipline is un-read by their materiality. Peer-Reviewed Global Feminist Anthology Open Access at https://a-day-is-a-struggle.decasia.org

Past Publications:

• Schaller, K. (2013) ‘I know it to be synthetic but it affects me strongly’: ‘Dead Mabelle’ and Bowen’s emotion pictures’ in Textual Practice 27 (1). pp. 163-185. ISSN 0950-236X 
• Schaller, K. (2008) ‘Finding Form and Inspiration’ in Cole, Knowles, and Promislow (eds.) Creating Scholartistry:  Imagining the Arts-informed Thesis or Dissertation (Backalong Press) ISBN 978-1-894132-30-5.
• Schaller, K. (2004) ‘Excerpt from “A Writing Story, on Being Written:  a Thetic Play on Words”’ in Coles, Knowles, Luciani & Neilsen (eds.) Provoked by Art:  Theorizing Arts-Informed Research (Backalong Press) ISBN: 1-894132-08-4. 
• Schaller, K. (2001) ‘Travel as Research, Research as Travel’ in Coles, Knowles & Neilsen (eds.) The Art of Writing Inquiry (Backalong Press) ISBN 1-894132-06-8
• Schaller, K. (2008) ‘The Haircut’ in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing Vol. 5:3, pp. 197-200, ISSN: 1479-0726.
• Schaller, K. (2010) ‘The Swimmer’. The New Writer, 101
• Schaller, K. (2010) ‘D.E.W. Line and Passiflora Edulis’. The New Writer, 100
• Schaller, K. (2006) ‘The Cartoon Man’ in Succour: The New Fiction, Poetry and Art, Issue 3 ‘Radio Eye’.
• Schaller, K. (2006) ‘Speech Therapy’ in Breach, Issue #2, Thursday Press, Brighton.

Recent Conferences and Invited Papers/Performances

• 'Witching the Institution: Feminist Witchcraft and Academia'. Film. 'Magic and Spirituality in 21st Century Media and Culture', Goldsmith's University. June 30, 2023.
• 'Witching the Institution: Feminist Witchcraft and Academia'. Live Performance. Invited Speakers York St John School of Humanities Methodologies Research Seminar. March 7 2023.
• “Embodied Metaphor: Architecture and Feeling” and “Feminist Dwelling”, Invited Speaker, Norwich University of the Arts, Dec 10, 2018.
• “Absorption and Contemporary Literary Practice”, British Association for Contemporary Literary Study, ‘What Happens Now 2018’, July 10-12 2018. Collaboration with Dr Ruth Charnock, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Lincoln University.
• “Brilliance and the Domestic Labour of Contemporary Literature Studies”, Invited Speaker at York St John Research Seminar, May 16, 2018.
• “The True Heart: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Impolitics of Love” at ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism, Manchester, April 6-8, 2018.
• “Contact Work: Affect, Literature and Pedagogy” Invited Speaker at ‘Feminist Methodologies’, Symposium at Loughborough University, March 20-21, 2018.
• “Rubbing: Feminine Diligence and Masculine Shine”, Invited Speaker at Lincoln University Humanities Research Seminar, Nov 17, 2017.
• “Rubbing: Feminine Diligence and Masculine Shine” at ‘Intimaterial’, Royal College of Art, London, Jun 15-16 2017.

Teaching and Research Supervision:

I’ve taught and convened at all year levels, including a number of years leading our largest undergraduate core module, and have substantial experience supervising undergraduate and MA dissertations in literature, philosophy, and art history.

My research-led teaching has included: The Art of Emotion: Literature, Writing, Feeling (final year); Fiction ‘after’ Modernism?: Re-reading the 20th Century (MA); Minor Literatures: Resistance, Radicalisation and Reading (final year, co-taught with my colleague Dr Jacob Huntley); The Short Story (second year); War Lives: Writing Britain in WWII (second year), Traumaturgies: Reading and Writing Trauma Across Contexts (third year). 

I have examined more than 13 PhDs for upgrade or probation and acted as internal examiner for one viva. I’ve supervised ten PhDs to completion (five AHRC/CHASE funded). My students work in areas related to emotion and/or feminism, and work either on critical PhDs or I supervise the critical component of their PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. Projects include:

• transmission technologies in the late 1960s fiction of Coover, Pynchon, Brophy and Kavan (A. Meric-Cleaver, current)
• bodies, meat and the feminine (M. Pearson, current)
• post-9/11 material affect (E. Page, current)
• militant suffragettes and imperial narratives: novel and critical study (F. Sinclair, current)
  
• compassion, contemporary literature and healthcare ethics (E. Vince, current)
• twenty-first-century feminist short stories: short story collection and critical thesis (M. Appleton, current)
• gendered island imaginaries: novel and critical thesis (Dr D. Redd, completed)
• trauma and identity in South East Asian Literature: novel and critical thesis (Dr S. Tao, completed)
• Buddhism, trauma and pedagogy in contemporary performance art: practise-based PhD (Dr P. Clarke, completed)
• critically neglected twentieth century women writers including:

• Betty Miller (Dr L. Felgett, completed)
• AL Barker (Dr K. Jones, completed)
• Ann Quin (Dr N. Williams, completed)
• Elizabeth Taylor (Dr D. Freeborne, completed)

I am currently the Chair of Examiners for the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, and am the Athena Swan / EDI Co-Lead.

Past Administrative Service in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing:

• Executive Team (2017-2019)
• Employability Director (2017-2019)
• MFA Creative-Writing Convenor (Jan - June 2019). I helped design the creative writing pedagogy component of this degree, and took over convening last spring to cover research leave.
• Teaching Committee (2012-2019)
• Staff Student Liaison Committee (2012-2019)
• Course Director for Q300 English Literature (2012-2018)
• Teaching Quality (2012-2018)
• Exam Board (2012-2018)
• designed and led Teaching Forum (2010-2013)
• designed and led Subject-Specific Teaching Programme (for literature and creative-critical doctoral researchers) (2010-2013)

Past Administrative Service in the Faculty of Humanities: 

• Faculty of Humanities Employability Executive (2017-2019)
• University Senate Member (2016-2018)
• MA Gender Studies Development Group led by Professor Yvonne Tasker, Dean Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2016-2017). I co-designed one of the core modules for the MA (‘Gender in Study’).
• co-designed and co-taught the Faculty of Humanities AHRC/CHASE-funded doctoral training programme ‘Preparing to Teach’ (2010 - 2016)
• Transitions Steering Committee led by Dr Clive Matthews, Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching Quality (2015-2016), dedicated to redeveloping HUM induction programmes.
• ThoughtOut (Public Humanities) led by Professor Sarah Churchwell (2009-2011)

I did my Honours BA in English Literature and European History at Dalhousie University in Canada from 1993-1997, then studied pedagogical philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University from 2000-2002, where I  specialised in radical feminist, critical anti-racist and social justice approaches to epistemology and research methodology and my MA thesis was awarded a Canadian Governor General's Gold Academic Medal and a Senate Medal of Distinction for my academic achievements and research potential.

After graduating I spent three years working as Director of Fundraising and Communications of the Nova Scotia branch of Leave Out ViolencE, a Canadian youth violence intervention and prevention programme. In 2005 I began my DPhil in English Literature at the University of Sussex.