Kristen Treen

Dr Kristen Treen studied for a BA in English (2009) at Jesus College, Cambridge, before completing her M.Phil in American Literature (2011) and her Ph.D (2017), as a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities, at King's College, Cambridge. She joined the University of St Andrews in 2018.

Kristen's research focusses on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature and its formal intersections with objects and material states. Her first monograph, States of Destruction: Literature, Material Culture, and the American Civil War, 1861-1905, currently under revision, traces how the material remnants left behind by the American Civil War shaped literary form, commemorative expression, and concepts of national identity between 1861 and 1905.

Kristen has written on the impact of Civil War objects on current affairs in the States for Apollo and the U.S. National Council for Public History. Her interest in Civil War commemoration is also reflected in 'Commemorative Cultures: The American Civil War Monuments Project', a large, long-term, collaborative digital heritage project she co-created with Dr Jillian Caddell. The project's growing website, data set, and collection of materials can be found here.

More recently, this work has led to a collaboration with the U.S. National Park Service team at Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky. It has also resulted in two externally-funded projects of which Kristen is PI: 'Histories of hope? Museum Redevelopment at Camp Nelson National Monument' (AHRC Catalyst Award, 2025), and 'Remembering Refugees: Black Civil War Memory and Contemporary Commemoration' (Leverhulme Research Project Grant, 2025).

Kristen's next large research project will consider emergent approaches to commemoration and creative, intellectual, and political writing about memory during the Reconstruction era.