Biography 

Kristen Case is an associate professor, executive director, and academic director of Monson Seminary, part of the Maine Public University System. She began her career between 2002 and 2009 as a lecturer at several American universities. From 2010 to 2024, she taught American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she became a full professor. She also co-directed a major cultural project funded by the Mellon Foundation. She has been director of the Monson Seminar since 2024. Kristen Case is a specialist in 19th-century literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy. She is also a writer.

Collaboration with IHRIM

Kristen Case is an internationally recognized writer and scholar specializing in 19th-century literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy, particularly American transcendentalist authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Since 2009, she has maintained an ongoing working relationship with François Specq, her host professor, who is himself involved in Kristen Case's current publishing projects.

In addition, Kristen Case will be a member of the jury for one of her PhD students at IHRIM, Zhihua Zhang, on the educational philosophies of Confucius and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She also met Julien Nègre, senior lecturer in North American studies at IHRIM, at the conference organized at ENS de Lyon in 2017 and hopes to strengthen her collaboration with him.

Kristen Case will give three lectures open to all during her stay at ENS de Lyon:

• Thursday, September 18, 2025, 10 a.m.–12 p.m., Room D2-020: “An Autobiography (in Theory)”
• Wednesday, September 24, 2025, 5pm-7pm, room D2-128: “Emerson and the Grammar of Life”
• Wednesday, October 1, 2025, 5pm-7pm, room D2-128: “Thoreau's Temporal Imagination”

Major publications

Books

• Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Natural Phenomena, Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2025.
• Daphne (poetry collection), Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2025.
• Principles of Economics (poetry collection). Switchback Books, 2019.
• Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (digital chapbook), Essay Press, 2016.
• Little Arias (poetry collection), New Issues Press, 2015.
• Temple (poetry chapbook), MIEL Books, 2014.
• American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe. Camden House, “Mind and American Literature” Series, ed. Linda Simon, 2011. (Paperback, 2017).

Edited collective works

• The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. Co-Editor with James Finely. Oxford UP. (Forthcoming, 2026).
• William James and Literary Studies. Co-Editor with Kate Stanley. Cambridge UP. (Forthcoming, 2026).
• Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of An American Icon. Co-Editor with Henrik Otterberg and  Rochelle Johnson. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2021.
• 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th-Century Archive. Co-Editor with Alexandra Manglis, Milkweed Editions, 2019.
• Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments. Co-Editor with Kevin Van Anglen, Cambridge University Press, 2016.