Karen V. Kukil is Associate Curator of Special Collections at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. For the past sixteen years, Ms. Kukil has supervised the scholarly use of the Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf collections in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, where she has made the rare book and manuscript collections accessible to undergraduates through lectures and exhibitions. A popular interterm course taught by Ms. Kukil requires students to examine and edit variant drafts of Plath’s Ariel poems, which are also part of the college’s extensive Sylvia Plath Collection.

Since 2004 Ms. Kukil has also served as Associate Curator of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History Archives (SSC). Coordinating the teaching program and providing reference services for the SSC are her primary responsibilities. In 2006 she curated an exhibition for the opening of the Jane Harman Congressional Papers. She recently co-organized the Power of Women’s Voices, a 65th anniversary symposium, featuring feminist activist Gloria Steinem.

Ms. Kukil co-hosted a Sylvia Plath Symposium at Smith College, April 25-26, 2008 and was a featured speaker at the 75th Anniversary Sylvia Plath Symposium at Oxford in the United Kingdom, Oct. 25-29, 2007. She also edited The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, published by Faber and Faber in London and Anchor Books in New York in 2000. The text of this unabridged edition of the journals is an exact transcription of the original manuscripts located in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College and gives readers greater access to the private thoughts of one of America’s most important twentieth-century poets.

Search the Five College Library Catalog for The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Edited by Karen V. Kukil.

Search the Five College Library Catalog for the Sylvia Plath Collection, 1940-1981, located in the Mortimer Rare Book Room.

The creative marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was the focus of a collaborative exhibition co-curated by Karen Kukil and Stephen Enniss at the Grolier Club in 2005. The accompanying catalog, “No Other Appetite”: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and the Blood Jet of Poetry, won the 2007 Division One Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibition Award, sponsored by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

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In 2003 Karen Kukil co-hosted the Thirteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Smith College, which was attended by over 350 international scholars. Woolf in the Real World, a selection of the 200 papers and plenary sessions at the conference, was edited by Ms. Kukil for Clemson University Digital Press in 2005.

Search the Five College Library Catalog for Woolf in the Real World, Edited by Karen V. Kukil.

In addition, Ms. Kukil’s featured exhibitions Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own and Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album were recently digitized for the Smith College library website.

Martin Antonetti and Karen Kukil look over
Leslie Stephen's photograph album.

Ms. Kukil attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she received a B.A. in English. There, she studied, among others, the works Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath with Dianne Hunter, a distinguished member of the English faculty. She then went on to earn a Master of Library Sciences degree at Southern Connecticut State University.

Karen’s professional background includes experience in publishing and advertising, in addition to her staff appointments at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Lewis Walpole Library, where she worked closely with renowned collector and editor Wilmarth S. Lewis.

Karen Kukil is currently a member of the Modern Language Association, American Library Association, New England Archivists, and the International Virginia Woolf Society. She also writes scholarly articles and poetry and has recently begun to exhibit her watercolor paintings.

Karen shows Sylvia Plath manuscripts to students in the Mortimer Rare Book Room.

Karen (holding the rugby ball), 1976

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Last Updated: May 30, 2008