About Kayley Thomas

I am an Assistant Professor of English at Gulf Coast State College and an ABD PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida. My research engages with writing and publishing practices, nineteenth-century British literature, genre fiction, popular culture, and adaptation and intertextuality.

My dissertation, Crime for Art’s Sake: British Crime Fiction Writers, Literary Value, and the Field of Cultural Production in 1890s Periodicals, examines the crime fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, and E.W. Hornung in the context of a literary marketplace undergoing a transformation from a petty-commodity mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. In a growing divide between “serious” and popular literature, economic success effectively equated to aesthetic failure for these authors, and in response to this tension, I demonstrate how Conan Doyle, Allen, and Hornung worked to assign aesthetic and cultural value to their characters’ crimes and social deviations, and in so doing, disrupt distinctions between highbrow and mass market literature.

At Gulf Coast State College, I teach a variety of literature and composition courses. I have previously taught courses in composition and rhetoric, literature, technical and professional communication, and digital and visual media at Santa Fe College and the University of Florida. I love working with students, and I conceive of my classroom as a space of multimodal learning, collaboration, and creation.

My other loves include creative writing, making art, video games, and short walks on the beach (because even after years of living here, Florida summers are still too hot for me).