PUBLICATIONS
scholarly
The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY Press, 2020)
Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy, ed. (Routledge, 2016)
creative
Si | If, bilingual edition, forthcoming 2027
the deering hour (Ornithopter Press, 2021)
Karen Elizabeth Bishop is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Founding Director of the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative, and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Comparative Literature. Her research interests include contemporary poetry and poetics, lyric theory, poethics, translation studies, narratology, human rights, cartography, and memory and urban studies, particularly memory sites, mass graves, and necropolitics. She works in Spanish, English, and French. Before coming to Rutgers, she was Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard.
She has just completed a book titled Notes on Lyric Risk, which brings together reflections on lyric theory, philosophy, art history, memoir, and poetry to examine what lyric risks, and the human risks we take in speaking in lyric. The book will be of interest to scholarly, creative, and lay audiences.
Professor Bishop is the author of The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY Press, 2020), which examines how disappearance as a specifically modern epistemological category dovetails in modern fiction with the political disappearances carried out by the Argentine state from 1976-1983. The book studies how absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors crafted to respond to the country’s use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. Bishop recalibrates our understanding of the urgent reciprocities between form, fiction, history, and human rights for scholars of Latin American literature, as well as for scholars of other global literatures where enforced disappearance remains a weapon of state repression.
Her current academic work looks at the temporal instantiations of contemporary elegy and its reading practices. She is the co-founder (with David Sherman, Brandeis U) of The Elegy Project, a public humanities initiative that publishes and distributes elegies in public spaces around the globe. The Elegy Project was the inaugural recipient of the 2023 Community Megaphone Fellowship from the Woodberry Poetry Library at Harvard University. Professor Bishop is also the 2025 recipient of a two-year Rutgers Global Grant to support collaboration between The Elegy Project and major literary and humanistic centers in Scotland.
Professor Bishop is also an active poet and translator. Her debut collection of poetry, the deering hour, was published by Ornithopter Press in 2021; Si|If, a collection of poems written in Spanish and translated in English will appear in a self-translated bilingual edition in 2027; and she is currently finishing her second collection of poems written in English. Recent poems and translations appear in the Tahoma Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, The Lincoln Review, Amsterdam Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and anthologized in New Writing Scotland. She has been twice short-listed for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, judged by the late John Burnside, and is a 2025 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellow in Poetry, which awards a generous $17,000 purse to support her current work.
EDUCATION
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, University of California at Santa Barbara
- year-long residential fellowship at the École normale supérieure, Paris, Rue d’Ulm
- M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California at Santa Barbara
- B.A. in Literature, College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara
COURSES TAUGHT AT RUTGERS
undergraduate teaching :: for Spanish & Portuguese, Comparative Literature & SAS Honors Program
Comparative Literature Proseminar in Writing & Research
Literary Translation and Book Arts in the Hispanic World
Modern Poetry: The Documentary Impulse
Riesgos: Experimentación, novedad y vanguardia poética en América Latina
The Haunted
Introduction to Hispanic Literatures (honors)
Introduction to Hispanic Literatures
Lives of the Dead (SAS interdisciplinary honors seminar)
Literature and Culture of Latin America
Literature and Culture of Spain
Advanced Spanish Conversation & Contemporary Issues
Introduction to Short Fiction
Advanced Composition & Introduction to Translation Studies
Comparative Literature Senior Capstone Writing Seminar
Based on a True Story: Documentary Narrative in 20th Century Latin American Literature
Human Rights in Latin American Literature
independent studies courses in creative writing (poetry) in Spanish
graduate teaching :: for Spanish & Portuguese, Comparative Literature & Masters of Arts in Teaching
Theory & Practice of Spanish Literary Translation
Lyric Risk
Theory & Practice of Literary Translation
Introduction to Contemporary Literary Theory: A Close Reading
Writing Torture in the Southern Cone
Based on a True Story: Fiction and History in Latin America
SELECTED AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS
- Rutgers Global Grant to support The Elegy Project International; $9,736
- New Jersey State Council on the Arts | Mid-Atlantic Arts Council, Fellow in Poetry, 2025; $17,000
- Inaugural Community Megaphone Fellowship, Woodberry Poetry Library, Harvard University
- Center for Cultural Analysis annual seminar, co-director, “Scale: A Seminar in the Urban Humanities,” Rutgers University, 2022-2023
- Rutgers Research Council Grant, 2019
- residency with the Bioart Society of Finland’s Arts-Science Field Laboratory on the Ecology of Senses at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Lapland, 2018
- MLA Executive Committee on Literatures of the US in Languages Other than English, 2016-2021
- MLA Delegate Assembly, representative of Committee on Academic Labour, 2016-2019
- Research Grant, Center for Latin American Studies, Rutgers University, 2013
- American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, 2010-2012
- President’s Dissertation Fellowship, Office of the President, Unviersity of California, 2007-2008
- year-long residential fellowship at the École normale supérieure, Paris, Rue d’Ulm, 2005-2006