Kristin Boudreau is the Paris Fletcher Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Arts, the head of the Department of Humanities and Arts, and associate dean of arts and sciences at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She has written about the literature of slavery, the labor movement, capital cases, and modernization in more than twenty refereed journal publications and book chapters and in four books: Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiment from Jefferson to the Jameses (University Press of Florida, 2002); The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases (Prometheus Books, 2006); Henry James's Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Henry James's Daisy Miller (Broadview edition, 2012; Boudreau was co-editor and wrote the introduction). She holds a BA in English from Cornell University and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester.
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Reviews
""This exploration of execution literature offers not only close analysis of literary works--from bestselling books to little-known poems--inspired by publicly sanctioned deaths, but also vivid retellings of some less than judicious episodes in America's past....Boudreau's...consideration of literature of the public conscience--whether watershed or nearly anonymous--is thought-provoking and timely." - Publishers Weekly "The Spectacle of Death ... is a very readable and fascinating trip through American history. It ... makes an important contribution to our knowledge of America's vexed relationship to the ultimate punishment." - Austin Sarat William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College