Mary A. Waters

Mary A. Waters serves as the M. V. Hughes Distinguished Professor of English within the Department of English at Wichita State University's Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her teaching portfolio spans eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, women writers, and genre-focused courses in poetry, fiction, literary theory, and digital humanities.

She earned her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and previously held teaching positions at Holy Names College, UC Davis, Temple University, and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her scholarly work centers on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women literary critics' contributions to Romantic-era aesthetic debates, utilizing frameworks from print culture studies, periodical analysis, British national identity formation, and literary professionalization.

Dr. Waters is the author of British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and editor of British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of their Literary Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her research appears in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Prose, alongside publications from Ashgate and Cambridge University Press.

She currently develops The Criticism Archive, a digital repository of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women's literary criticism integrated with The Poetess Archive and federated through NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship).