Biography
Katie Kadue received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and English literature explores relationships between domestic and poetic labor; agricultural and intellectual cultivation; and gender and genre. Her current book project, Domestic Georgic from Rabelais to Milton, reads literary texts alongside gardening manuals and recipe books to argue that the Renaissance authors we most associate with groundbreaking literary feats that inaugurated a modern age conceived of their work as a form of housework: repetitive, tedious, and more like putting up preserves than creating something new. This early modern understanding of literary and rhetorical production as cyclical rather than progressive, as iterative rather than innovative, has implications for how we value both intellectual and domestic labor today. She is also beginning a second project, drawing on botanical and poetic discourses, that asks what certain tired tropes in Renaissance love lyric—particularly the comparison of women to imminently wilting flowers—have to do with conceptions of gender, literary form, and ecology.