Kristin Allukian

Associate Professor and Graduate Director

CONTACT

Office: CPR 360-D
Phone: 813-974-9529
Email

EDUCATION

  • Ph.D., University of Florida

  • M.A., Trinity College
  • B.A., Mount Holyoke College

AREAS OF SPECIALTY

American literature before 1900; women's literature; archive studies; gender, sexuality, and feminist theory; and digital humanities.

BIO

Kristin Allukian is a scholar of American literature before 1900 with expertise in women’s literature, archive studies, gender, sexuality, and feminist theory, labor studies, and digital humanities. Her award-winning first book Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature: Economic Insights of American Women Writers, 1852-1869 (Georgia, 2023) offers a critical intervention in slavery/capitalism studies by reading women’s literature as sites for exploring the material-historical connections between slavery and capitalism and articulating how imaginative writing can extend and reshape our understandings of economic systems. She is a section editor of Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing (Palgrave, 2018), an edited collection that highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Her current book project uses previously unexamined private letters from nineteenth-century women mill workers to explore what the epistolary culture of the United States’s first class of wage-earning women workers can tell us about key moments in U.S. labor history. Allukian has published articles in leading journals including Legacy, ESQ, Women’s Studies, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, and Resources for American Literary Study. Her work has been supported by research grants from organizations including the Massachusetts Historical Society, the McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship,  the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association, the USF Humanities Institute, and USF Women in Philanthropy and Leadership. Prior to joining USF, she was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Pedagogy at Georgia Tech.

Allukian teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that explore a range of issues in pre-1900 American literature including social reform, labor debates, feminisms, etc. through archive studies and digital humanities (DH) methodologies. She oversees a DH lab and is co-founder, with Dr. Ana Stevenson, of the Suffrage Postcard Project, a feminist digital humanities project. The Suffrage Postcard Project is a team initiative between faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students; it integrates DH methodologies with feminist archival work to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist DH practices engender new historical narratives about the suffrage movement. Allukian has served on over forty doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate dissertation and thesis committees. She is Graduate Director of English, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, and affiliate faculty of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Kristin Allukian is active in the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, serving as VP of Membership & Finances (2023-2026) and as an Advisory Board member (2026-2029) and serves on the Executive Council of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (2023-present).

Dr. Allukian welcomes inquiries from interested graduate students; please contact her directly at kallukian@usf.edu.

Selected PUBLICATIONS

Books

  • Slavery, Capitalism, & Women’s Literature: Economic Insights of American Women Writers, 1852-1869. University of Georgia Press, 2023. Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2025 Book Award.
  • Eds. Kristin J. Jacobson, Kristin Allukian, Leslie Allison, Ricki-Ann Legleitner. Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave, 2018.

Articles and Book Segments

  • “Woven Whiteness in Lucy Larcom’s ‘Weaving.’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 40.1-2 (2023): 85-107.
  • “Marriage, Career, and Class in the Private Letters of Harriot Curtis, Co-Editor of the Lowell Offering.” Resources for American Literary Study, 42.2 (June 2021): 225-255.
  • “The Suffrage Postcard Project: Transatlantic Suffrage History and Feminist Digital Archiving.” Co-authored with Dr. Ana Stevenson. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 8.8 (May 2021): 1-25.
  • “Decentering Digital Discomfort: Feminist Digital Pedagogy in the DH Lab.” Co-authored with A. Cendrowski and A. Duque. Hybrid Pedagogy. (October 2020): np.
  • “The ‘Brilliant Careers’ of Women Lecturers and Other ‘Terrible Creatures’ in Henry James’ The Bostonians and Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. 65.1 (July 2019): 73-107.
  • “Early American Women Writers: The Potentiality of the Continual Self-Creating Act” and “Afterword: Beyond Thresholds—Suggestions for Further Research and Teaching Resources for Early American Women Writers.” Liminal Spaces and Hybrid Lives in American Women’s Writing. Ed. Kristin J. Jacobson. New York: Palgrave, Spring 2018.
  • “A Conversation ‘in the Air’: Woman’s Right to Productive Labor in Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life and Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience.” Women’s Studies An inter-disciplinary journal. 45.16 (August 2016): 1-19.
  • “Rule-guided Expression: Gender Dissent across Mediated Literary Works.” Co-authored with M. Carassai. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. No. 8 (November 2015): np.
  • “‘If not in this world in another, perhaps?’: Transatlantic Approaches to the New Man Question in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Silent Partner,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations. 19.1 (April 2015): 25-45.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECT

The Suffrage Postcard Project is a digital archive which analyzes 1100+ early twentieth-century pro- and anti-suffrage postcards to explore how feminist digital humanities practices offer new historical narratives of the U.S. suffrage movement. Co-Founded with Dr. Ana Stevenson.