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Kristianne Kalata Vaccaro

Kristianne Kalata Vaccaro

Associate Professor/Chair

English Faculty


kalatak@westminster.edu

(724) 946-7350


Campus Location:
   Patterson Hall
   Office - 336
Mailbox: 167

 

About Me


Dr. Kristianne Kalata is an Associate Professor of English and the director of Westminster's Honors Program. She has been with Westminster since 2008, teaching courses in writing; autobiography; ancient, Victorian, and modernist literature; literary theory; women writers; and literature and medicine. She earned her bachelor's degree in English, summa cum laude, from Westminster and her master's and doctorate from Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA), where she specialized in nineteenth-century British literature and women's autobiographical narratives spanning the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Her essays have appeared in journals including Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The College English Association Forum, as well as in the edited collection, Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World. Currently, her research focuses on the psychology of reading as it relates to narrative techniques in the Bronte sisters' novels. 

Dr. Kalata is an active member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, an organization that takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying stories in traditional literary genres, such as novels, as well as non-literary settings, such as courtrooms. She is also an active scholar of teaching methods. She advises Westminster's secondary education minors in English and is grateful for the ways that work keeps her up-to-date on teaching practices in her field.