About Katharine

I am a university professor and scholar who specializes in seventeenth-century English literature, including early modern women writers. I earned my Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo and have taught at Sam Houston State, Miami of Ohio, and American University in Washington D.C. I am currently Professor of Literature and the Humanities at the Smith Institute of Political Economy and Philosophy and the Argyos School of Business at Chapman University in Orange, California. In my life as an English professor, I taught entry-level, advanced, and graduate courses in seventeenth-century poetry, prose, and drama; early modern women writers; writings by John Milton; and colonial American literature. At all levels, my period-based courses treated literature’s role in the culture wars that accompanied the English Civil Wars between Charles I’s royalists and Parliament’s roundheads. My pedagogy combined formalism with historicism to alert students to the ways in which the artistic properties of poetry, drama, and other cultural modes of expression were (and still are) used to debate competing visions of the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful.

In. my current position as a member of the Smith Institute at Chapman, I co-teach Humanomics courses, that is courses that combine humanistic with economic approaches to the big questions in life. I also teach freshman foundation courses in the Beats and other subjects, along with a philosophy course titled, “Feminism and Freedom.” In all my courses, I invite discussion and debate and encourage students to individuate themselves as thinkers. I take my motto from Walt Whitman: He most honors my style learns under it to destroy the teacher.

I grew up in such college towns in Ohio as Athens (where I was born), Urbana, and Ashland. I consider my true hometown to be Jackson, Ohio. I have lived in Philadelphia, Hamburg, Germany, Buffalo, Huntsville, Texas, Washingotn D.C., Oxford, Ohio, Los Angeles, and Orange County. I have been arrested in East Berlin, Dubrovnik, Yugoslovia, Prague, and Oxford, Ohio.

I love to watch sports, to eat my husband’s amazing cooking, to do yoga and walk, to talk politics and culture with my husband and my sons, and to spoil my cat, a Japanese bobtail who we rescued from the shelter and named Theo.

I think the world is crazy but still believe in freedom.

Katharine Gillespie
Professor of Literature and the Humanities
The Smith Institute of Political Economy and Philosophy
The Argyos School of Business
The Department of Philosophy (affiliate)
Chapman University
Orange, CA
kgillespie@chapman.edu