Kristianne Kalata Vaccaro

Dr. Kristianne Kalata is Professor of English and Chair of English, Theater, and Visual Art programs at Westminster. She has been with the College since 2008 and served as Director of the All-College Honors program from 2018 - 2023. Dr. Kalata teaches 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.