Kunz to present at F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in Sweden this summer

Heidi Kunz

Heidi Kunz likes to joke that some students take her classes just to see the harpoon.

Propped up in one corner of her office, it’s a symbol of Kunz’s fascination with maritime culture, which began in 2006 when she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to attend the Munson Institute of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.

During a summer residency there, Kunz, Randolph’s Katherine Haas Eichelbaum ’32 Professor of English, participated in a multidisciplinary program about United States maritime culture.

“It trained me in a whole new way of looking at U.S. literature because it’s sea-oriented rather than land-oriented,” she said. “When you look at something from a different perspective, all sorts of fresh ideas pop. It has informed my interpretive thinking about literature ever since.”

She continued that work during her recent sabbatical, doing research on maritime writers of the 1920s and 1930s and how they influenced the writing of F. Scott Fizgerald.

Kunz., who is teaching a course called Inspired by the Sea this spring, will present on the topic at the 16th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in Vaxjo, Sweden, this summer.

She was also recently awarded a Davidson Reassigned Time Award, an internal College award that will allow her to be relieved of one course during Session 2 next fall. She’ll use that time to develop the presentation into a formal book chapter for The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald.