Rate My Professor Karen Kornweibel

Karen Kornweibel serves as Dean of The Keeping Sights Upward (KSU) Journey Honors College and Professor of English at Kennesaw State University, a position she assumed in July 2022. Prior to joining KSU, she held the role of Associate Dean for Academics in the Honors College and Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University from 2007 to 2022. During her tenure at ETSU, Kornweibel directed the University and Midway Honors Scholars Programs. She spearheaded a comprehensive restructuring of the honors academic programs, which involved expanding faculty recruitment efforts, overseeing the development of two new cohort honors programs along with corresponding honors minors, introducing a more holistic honors application and admissions process, revising the honors scholarship funding model, initiating an honors peer-mentoring program, and incorporating several new honors courses into the curriculum. Additionally, she was an inaugural and ongoing member of the advisory board for ETSU’s Center for Teaching Excellence and served on the university’s Academic Programs and Opportunities Task Force from 2012 to 2013. Kornweibel has been a featured speaker at conferences nationwide on topics including race relations and the development of honors colleges.

Earning her Bachelor’s degree in general literature from the University of California, San Diego, Kornweibel pursued advanced studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she obtained both her Master’s and Doctorate in comparative literature between 1994 and 2000. Her scholarly work focuses on 19th-century African American and Afro-Cuban literature, exploring the intersections of race, national identity, history, and culture to promote more inclusive and just societies. Notable publications include her book, Writing for Inclusion: Literature, Race, and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the United States (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); “Daisy Rubiera Castillo’s Reyita: Mujer Negra. From Objectified Symbol to Empowered Subject” in Letras Hispanas (2010); “A complex resurrection: race, spectacle, and complicity in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus” in South Atlantic Review (2009); “The fecundity of folkloric space: Revising hierarchies in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men and Lydia Cabrera's Cuentos negros de Cuba” in Comparative American Studies (2004); and contributions to The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Her work has appeared in multiple national journals.