Biography

Kara Watts researches minoritized affective-aesthetic categories in twentieth-century British and American modernism. Her dissertation recovers then re-assesses the critically dismissed category of “charm” in Anglophone modernist literature. It argues that charm’s hold over modernist writers lies in its function as an alluring blank—a space that renders legible the foundations of modernist projects in genderedness and racialization. Watts has recently published on the “cute” in early English modernity, and has taught in the English, Writing & Rhetoric, and Gender & Women’s Studies departments at URI. She was the recipient of a Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship for 2017-18.