https://www.kellymrich.com/about daily 1.0 2026-01-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622144351877-2RO0HVZJJGN8FXD4QMTZ/IMG_0197.JPG About - Kelly M. Rich is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College. She is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century literatures in English, with a particular focus on the novel. Her research investigates what it means to have the state seek to repair the wounds of war and violent conflict, particularly in the wake of the Second World War and the beginning of the Global Cold War. Her first book, States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), studies Britain’s transition from warfare to welfare and its influence on the literary imagination. She is currently developing her second book project, Children of Conflict: Transnational Adoption and Cultural Form, which explores the formalization of transnational adoption in the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the representational logic that underwrote these kinship practices, this project examines how transnational adoption became figured as a form of geopolitical reparation: a logic of family making that often occluded the violent conditions of family breaking. Her work has appeared in journals including ELH, Law & Literature, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and Contemporary Literature; a special issue on Kazuo Ishiguro that she co-edited for Modern Fiction Studies with Chris Holmes; and The Cambridge Companion to Late Modernism. She also edited the MLA prize-winning volume The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) with co-editors Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger. She received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Wellesley, she taught at Harvard University from 2016 to 2024. CV available here. [image: Green Leaves, Paule Marrot] https://www.kellymrich.com/contact daily 0.75 2024-08-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622218239680-F7RZQ7LL8AVPPE1MLQK7/image-asset.jpeg Contact - Contact information kr114@wellesley.edu 103B Founders Hall Department of English and Creative Writing Wellesley College Schedule office hours here. https://www.kellymrich.com/teaching daily 0.75 2026-01-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622304933225-LB197XD2BV0LR842L0UF/Adams-from+guard+tower00200v.jpg Teaching - Law and Literature This course will explore the complex relationship between literature and law, focusing on how each represents and responds to violence and its aftermath. As we survey a series of twentieth-century juridical paradigms (trials, rights, reparations, and reconciliation), our goal will not be to judge the efficacy of literary and legal projects, but rather to study how they imagine issues of guilt, responsibility, testimony, commemoration, apology and forgiveness. Our readings will include novels, short stories, poetry, legal theory, documentaries, and key documents of international law: authors will most likely include Hannah Arendt, J.M. Coetzee, Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka, Michael Ondaatje, Julie Otsuka, and M. NourbeSe Philip. (image: “Manzanar Relocation Center from tower,” Ansel Adams, 1943) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622304334545-2KWKL90K9LGSOOX9XSLD/image-asset.jpeg Teaching - Representing War This course will explore a range of approaches to representing war. Among the questions we will ask are: When does war begin, and when does it end? At what distance do we sense war, and at what scale does it become legible? What are the stakes of writing, filming, or recording war, or for that matter, studying its representations? We will address these issues through units on violence, trauma, apocalypse, mourning, repair, visuality, and speed. Texts will most likely include Homer’s Iliad, novels by Virginia Woolf and Pat Barker, Supreme Court cases, films by Alain Resnais and Akira Kurosawa, and theory by Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, Sun Tzu, and Paul Virilio. (image: “Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812–1813,” Charles Joseph Minard, 1869) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622304620835-QCBUSRN49V43OJV3LU66/image-asset.jpeg Teaching - Global Fictions This course serves as an introduction to the global novel in English, as well as a survey of critical approaches to transnational literature. Along the way, we will consider specific issues of migration, colonialism, “new Englishes,” cosmopolitanism and globalization, the influence of religion and fundamentalism, environmental concerns, the global and divided city, racial and sexual politics, and international kinship. Authors will most likely include Teju Cole, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Monique Truong. (image: glossary from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, 1985) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622302839220-XMBWYO4QAAYEMMRT63HP/image-asset.jpeg Teaching - A Divided Kingdom: Nation, Race, and Belonging in Postwar Britain When Aldwyn Roberts, famed Trinidadian calypsonian “Lord Kitchener,” landed in England, he commemorated the event by singing “London Is the Place for Me,” a song celebrating the beauty and hospitality of his “Mother Country.” Roberts was a passenger on the ship Empire Windrush, whose 1948 arrival from the West Indies signaled a new era of migration to the UK from its colonies, many of which would gain independence over the next fifty years. But was Britain the place for them? As many discovered, making a home there was a fraught process, fueled by long-existing structures of racial prejudice that continue and evolve to this day. This course explores the cultural politics of British identity after 1945: a period whose social and political upheavals both radically redefine and conservatively re-entrench “British” as a category of analysis. From the 1958 Notting Hill race riots to current-day Brexit, national belonging has always been a complex and contested process, one that fuels myriad forms of desire and alienation. During our time together, we will ask: how do artists and theorists engage with problems of inequality, histories of empire and migration, politics of race, sexuality, and class, and practices of community-building? How do they respond to these aspects of modern social life, as well as re-imagine what that sociality might look like? We will approach these questions by focusing on Black and Asian British literatures—including works by authors Buchi Emecheta, Bernadine Evaristo, Jackie Kay, Hanif Kureishi, Andrea Levy, Daljit Nagra, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon, Kamila Shamsie, Warsan Shire, and Zadie Smith—as well as selections from the fields of postcolonial, feminist, and cultural studies. (image: Small Island set, National Theatre production, 2019 - personal photograph) https://www.kellymrich.com/events daily 0.75 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/adoption-reading-group daily 0.75 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship daily 0.75 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/guilt-witnessing-and-writing-the-early-aftermath monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/adoption-archives monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-six-z2ms8 monthly 0.5 2021-05-30 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-five-87arm monthly 0.5 2023-04-12 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-five-87arm-78c3j monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-four-g3rr9 monthly 0.5 2021-05-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622216417298-FA8C2C87ZEYS76JN3JXK/image-asset.jpeg Selected Scholarship - Ishiguro After the Nobel - Ishiguro After the Nobel Special issue of Modern Fiction Studies Spring 2021 || Co-edited with Chris Holmes Introduction: On Rereading Kazuo Ishiguro This essay re-evaluates Kazuo Ishiguro's literary legacy in light of our contemporary moment, noting how is work has changed our study of the novel and its institutions. It begins by considering what it means to reread Ishiguro, suggesting that rereading plays a pivotal role in his plots, authorial style, oeuvre, and, as we see in his Nobel Speech, his formation as a writer. The essay then discusses two indices of Ishiguro's impress on literary study—the contemporary and world literature—using them to contextualize our contributors' work on issues regarding critical method, prestige, the archive, genre, and global capital. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2021.0000 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5f74b1c6338a638c85d837/1622216556798-UVT6M2202X3EU5X7ZPYK/image-asset.jpeg Selected Scholarship - Ishiguro After the Nobel - Table of Contents Anne Whitehead, “Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Between Archive and Repertoire” Matthew Eatough, "' ‘Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?’: Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige” Doug Battersby, “Reading Ishiguro Today: Suspicion and Form” Jerrine Tan, “Screening Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Early Japan Novels and the Way We Read World Literature” Jane Hu, “Typical Japanese: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Asian Anglophone Historical Novel” Thom Dancer, “Being Kathy H.: Relatability in Never Let Me Go” Adam Parkes, “Ishiguro’s ‘Strange Rubbish’: Style and Sympathy in Never Let Me Go” https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/44186 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-three-nzy8l monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-two-r8hcr monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/project-one-k3ed7 monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/novel-dialogue monthly 0.5 2021-05-30 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/troublinghumanities monthly 0.5 2026-01-08 https://www.kellymrich.com/scholarship/the-aesthetic-life-of-infrastructure monthly 0.5 2022-12-16