Kelly Duquette Williams

Kelly Williams teaches English 1102 (Composition II) through the thematic lens of the "STEM Renaissance." She has 7 years of experience teaching writing-intensive courses and her pedagogy draws on digital media to engage STEM learners in multimodal communication. A central question of her composition II course is “how does knowing the history of our academic disciplines make us better researchers and communicators today?” To explore answers to this question, students utilize a diverse range of learning technologies to help make 400-year-old artifacts relevant to 21st century writers. For example, Williams recently added a new slate of learning technologies to her courses -- including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reailty (AR) video games -- and is conducting research on "VR in the composition classroom" in partnership with the Center for 21st Century Universities.

Williams's research focuses on pre-modern race studies, environmental science, and histories of science more generally. Her current book project is Scorched Earths: Extraction and Ecology in Early Modern Literature. Scorched Earths locates our modern climate crisis in premodern ideas about the environment, namely ecophobia and ecocide, and argues that early modern literature both documents England’s emerging military-industrial complex and promotes an environmental ethos founded upon extractive processes.

Williams has published scholarship in the journal Shakespeare and the edited volume, Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance. Inspired by her material science and engineering students at Georgia Tech, Williams is currently working on research related to Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays and the history of asphalt industrialization. She received her Ph.D. in English from Emory University in May 2023.