Endowed Chairs and Professorships
About the Hillman Distinguished Professor
Linda A. Kinnahan, Ph.D.
Endowed by the Hillman Foundation, this professorship rotates among Duquesne’s 10 schools for a five-year term. The initial Hillman Professor (2001-2006) was David Allen Wehr of the Mary Pappert School of Music, who now holds the Jack W. Geltz Distinguished Piano Chair.
Rotating to the School of Education, the Hillman Professorship supported Dr. Rodney Hopson from 2006-2011. Hopson teaches and conducts research in the areas of Ethnographic Evaluation, Sociolinguistics, Social Politics and Policy, and Foundations of Education.
Dr. Linda A. Kinnahan became the third Hillman Distinguished Professor on July 1, 2011. Kinnahan, a professor of English in the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, joined Duquesne in 1990. She is an expert in 20th century poetry, women’s and gender studies, and feminist theory. Kinnahan teaches courses in these areas and on American women poets and creative writing, among others. A past chair of the Department of English, Kinnahan is acting director of the McAnulty College’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, a program she co-founded. In 2008, she coordinated an international conference on Duquesne’s campus that celebrated women poets from the 20th and 21st centuries.
“I’m honored and humbled to receive this appointment, especially among so many deserving people at Duquesne who I admire,” said Kinnahan. “This opportunity will support a range of research activities that include traveling to important archives, interviewing poets and gaining time to think, read and write.”
Her work has appeared in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Poetry Review and Contemporary Literature. Kinnahan’s article, Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge and Marianne Moore will appear in this fall’s The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
Kinnahan’s current book project is a study of women poets from the early part of the 20th century. “The study places their work within the contexts of changing economic ideas and practices related to the rise of consumer capitalism in this period, especially as ideas of value, labor and possession respond to new economic systems and theories,” Kinnahan says.
In addition, Kinnahan is a member of the editorial advisory board for HOW(2), an online journal devoted to women’s innovative writing, and the advisory board for the University of Iowa Series on North American Poetry.