Katie King

website: http://www.katiekin.weebly.com

After her Army brat girlhood living around the U.S. including the D.C. area, in Japan shortly after the U.S. occupation following WWII, and in Turkey as the Berlin Wall went up at the height of the Cold War, Katie King went to college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. There she became involved in the anti-war, women's and gay liberation movements in the early seventies. She spent summers teaching English in Thailand as the Vietnam War deteriorated, and school terms studying Sappho with Norman O. Brown, cybernetics with Gregory Bateson, Beowulf with Harry Berger, Jr. and Southeast Asian anthropology with Shelly Errington, receiving an interdisciplinary joint BA in Anthropology and Literature.

In the eighties she returned to Santa Cruz, entering the program in the History of Consciousness after spending time in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Under the direction of Donna Haraway, she wrote a doctoral dissertation applying epistemological analyses derived from science studies to the materialities of textual editing and feminist political activism in constructions of "poetry" in the work of Emily Dickinson and Audre Lorde.

Settling into the women's studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986, she spent brief stints at Cornell University on a post-doc and with their Humanities Center in the late eighties, and a sabbatical in the mid-nineties divided between UC-Santa Cruz, associated with their Center for Cultural Studies, and UC-Irvine, associated with their Humanities Center. Since then she has participated in colloquia and institutes at the Folger Library, Washington, D.C. and participated in graduate workshops in feminist methods in Sweden for the Nordic Research School. She serves as affiliate faculty in Comparative Literature, Performance, American and LGBT Studies, and is a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).

King's transdisciplinary research on writing technologies and digital culture works across disciplines and knowledge worlds, with an eye for intersectional issues and opportunities to queer theory and methodology. She uses feminist technoscience methods to explore media historically and theoretically, with tendrils in a range of disciplines - anthropology, literature, sociology, economics, history, classics, folklore and communications. Her books are Theory in its Feminist Travels: conversations in U.S. women's movements and Networked Reenactments, stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell. Two others are in progress: Speaking with Things, an introduction to writing technologies, and Demonstrations and Experiments: Quakers, plain style, and the Scientific Revolution. She has been published in the journals The Scholar & the Feminist Online, Writing Technologies, Criticism, Feminist Theory, camera obscura, Configurations, TEXT, Communications, and Cultural Studies.