Grace King is a PhD candidate in the Department of English who works at the intersections of the environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, and polar studies. Her dissertation-in-progress, currently titled “Phase Change: Transformations of Water and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Arctic Writings,” considers literary representations of the Arctic’s aquatic environment during the early period of U.S. imperialism in the Arctic between 1840 and 1920.

 

Grace was a PhD student at Penn State University before transferring to WashU. Between 2022-2024, she served as a Graduate Assistant to PSU’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library, where she developed a digital project highlighting a collection associated with the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska. The site, Harriman Recollected: New Views of an Expedition to Alaska, explores some of the possibilities and challenges of developing anti-colonial archival practices for collections that have enacted or continue to enact colonial harm.

 

Grace’s work will be published in fall 2025 in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.