Rate My Professor Kathryn Carter

Kathryn Carter is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, where she joined the faculty in 2000. She earned her BA from Wilfrid Laurier University, MA from the University of Waterloo, and PhD from the University of Alberta. Carter specializes in life writing, with a focus on women’s diaries from 19th-century Canada, letter writing by emigrants and settlers, particularly from Ireland, and early Canadian literature before 1920. She teaches a range of English courses, including advanced offerings on autobiography and life writing. Her research intersects women’s writing, 19th-century Canadian culture, cultural studies, and the narratives of history embedded in personal documents.

Carter has held prominent administrative roles, including Associate Vice President: Teaching and Learning, Interim Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, and Acting Dean of the Brantford campus from 2008 to 2009. She played a key role in arts initiatives, such as establishing The Yellow Brick Wall exhibition space and contributing to the Bachelor of Fine and Applied Arts in Game Design and Development. Her publications include editing The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996; co-editing Bearing Witness: Living with Ovarian Cancer with Laurie Elit (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009); and an article on feminist scholarship on diary writing in The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Other works feature 'An Economy of Words: Emma Chadwick Stretch’s Account Book Diary, 1859-1860' (Acadiensis, 1999), 'Discipline, Bodies, and Girls’ Diaries in Post-Confederation Canada' (Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, 2009), 'The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain' (Victorian Review, 1997), and 'SGML and the Orlando Project: Descriptive Markup for an Electronic History of Women’s Writing' (Computers and the Humanities, 1998). She received Full Merit Awards from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2010 and 2015, and the Teaching Wall of Fame from the University of Alberta Faculty of Arts in 2011.