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303 492 6042

Karen Ramirez is a Core Faculty member at the Sewall Residential Academic Program, where she teaches courses on the American West, western American literature, and Native American literature.

She has received the Dorothy Martin Faculty Award for excellence in teaching and activism concerning women's issues as well as a Marinus G. Smith award for her impact on CU undergraduate students.

In 2003, Ramirez received her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her research focused on re-conceptualizing popular, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, western American literature. She is the author of Reading Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (2006). Her current book project, Women's Periodical Writing and the Transnational American West, 1870-1920 , will be the first book-length study of women's periodical writing about the American West from this time period when both periodical writing about the West and women's publication in periodicals expanded dramatically. Ramirez is currently the Co-President of the Western Literature Association, and in October 2008, she brought the Western Literature Association's annual conference to Boulder .

Outside of her professional activities, Ramirez is a mother, a singer with Boulder's semi-professional a-cappella choir Ars Nova, a runner, and an outdoor enthusiast.