Kelly M. Rich

Kelly M. Rich is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century literatures in English, with a particular focus on the novel. Her research investigates what it means to have the state seek to repair the wounds of war and violent conflict, particularly in the wake of the Second World War and the beginning of the Global Cold War.

Her first book, States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), studies Britain’s transition from warfare to welfare and its influence on the literary imagination. She is currently developing her second book project, Children of Conflict: Transnational Adoption and Cultural Form, which explores the formalization of transnational adoption in the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the representational logic that underwrote these kinship practices, this project examines how transnational adoption became figured as a form of geopolitical reparation: a logic of family making that often occludes the violent conditions of family breaking.

Her research has appeared in journals including ELH, Law & Literature, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and Contemporary Literature, and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Late Modernism. With Chris Holmes, she co-edited a special issue on Kazuo Ishiguro for Modern Fiction Studies. She also edited the MLA prize-winning volume The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) with co-editors Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger.

She received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and her B.A. in English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought from Amherst College. Before coming to Wellesley, she taught at Harvard University from 2016 to 2024.

Education

• B.A., Amherst College
• M.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania