Katrina Powell

Katrina Powell is Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Tech. She teaches courses in autobiography, research methods, and rhetorical theory, has written two books about the displacement of families from Shenandoah National Park, The Anguish of Displacement (University of Virginia Press, 2007) and Answer at Once: Letters of Mountain Families in Shenandoah National Park, 1934-1938 (University of Virginia Press, 2009). Studying the hand-written letters of displaced residents to the government, Powell's research examines the ways that residents represented themselves to state and Park officials as their relocations approached. In addition to these two books, she acted as Assistant Producer for the documentary film (with filmmaker Richard Robinson) "Rothstein's First Assignment," which includes oral history interviews with descendants of displaced families. Her most recent book, Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement, was published this year at Routledge. This book expands her work on localized displacement to examine the transnational implications of displacement narratives and the ways that identity, representation, environment, and narrative are enacted across seemingly disparate displacement events such as eminent domain law, natural disaster, and civil unrest. In her "Rhetoric in Activism" and "Feminist Autobiography" courses, she asks students to develop creative projects to illustrate theories about the performative nature of autobiographical writing and the implications of composing a life story digitally. Her students also explore the various ways that writers represent identities and how life narrative might function as social activism.