Karen Little has been a professional student, teacher, or bookseller for most of her adult life. She holds a B.A. in English with a French minor (2007), an M.A. in Secondary Education (2009), and an M.A. in English (2014) from University of Kentucky. She also is ABD (all but dissertation) in Duke University’s English PhD program with a certificate in African and African American Studies. The portion of her dissertation that she wrote examined representations of Black American property ownership in twentieth century US fiction and film, especially by authors such as Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Octavia Butler, and Gloria Naylor. In service of this project, she researched the history of discriminatory and exclusionary property law in the US, the rights associated with home-ownership, and theorists who imagine a more ethical system of property. Her project was premised on the belief that everybody deserves the protections and comforts of home, which would require radical global systemic change. She trusts that writers of fiction have some of the best insights into building more equitable, humane futures. While at Duke she taught for both the Thompson Writing Program and the English Department, worked for the Representing Migration Humanities Lab, and co-managed the Americanist Speaker Series. She also worked as a research assistant copy-editing and indexing essay collections and monographs. Awards included the Stephen Horne Award for Excellence in Teaching; a fellowship with the Kenan Institute of Ethics; and a Bass Instructor of Record Fellowship. After returning to Lexington in 2021 she had a brief stint at the startup Wild Labs doing administrative and human resources work in support of COVID-19 testing and vaccination.
