Person

Wills, Kacie L.

I have a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside, and am currently an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois College. I employ a scholarly and pedagogical approach that embraces diversity and emphasizes non-traditional approaches to textual and archival material from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My book project, Fancy, Spectacle, and the Materiality of the Romantic Imagination in Pacific Exploration Culture, examines aspects of popular culture surrounding late eighteenth century Pacific exploration and the effects of Pacific voyages on the Romantic understanding of the fanciful imagination. Within this context, I pay special attention to archival objects, like scrapbooks, that tell us stories outside of the canon.