Bonnie J. Shaker, Ph.D.

Dr. Bonnie James Shaker is an Associate Professor of English at Kent State University at Geauga, where she teaches composition and literature through the College of Arts & Sciences and speech and media literacy through the College of Communication & Information. Over the years, she has also taught technical writing; news, editorial, and feature writing; and American journalism history. Her teaching, scholarship, and professional background meet at the intersection of English and Media Studies. Dr. Shaker spent five years in television news before earning her Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University, where she specialized in British and American literature of the long nineteenth century. Her book, Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth’s Companion Stories (2003), and articles combine her interests by focusing on the periodical fiction of nineteenth-century American author, Kate Chopin.

Dr. Shaker's teaching has been recognized at the university, campus, and departmental levels. She is a 2023 Kent State Outstanding Teaching Award Finalist, a recipient of the Geauga Campus Faculty Excellence Award (2019), and co-recipient of the Kent State English Department Outstanding Composition Instructor Award (2022). She has served as a member of the Kent State University Press Editorial Board (2020-23), associate editor of the Kate Chopin International Society website, and faculty adviser to The Listening Eye poetry journal and Geauga Student Media Club.

After utilizing digital archives and conducting on-site archival research at the Boston Public Library, Houghton Library, and Missouri Historical Museum, Dr. Shaker and a co-researcher recovered Chopin’s lost short story, “Her First Party.”

Select Publications:

Review: The New View from Cane River: Critical Essays on Kate Chopin’s At Fault. Ed. Heather Ostman. In Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers Fortieth Anniversary Double Issue, 40.1-2, Spring 2024.

“Medium’ as Metaphor for Discussing the Periodical,” Forum, American Periodicals, vol. 30, no. 1, 2020.

With Angela Pettitt and Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, "Recovering Kate Chopin's 'Her First Party'​: Media, Mediation, Message," American Periodicals, vol. 27, no. 1, 2017.

With Angela Pettitt. "'Her First Party' as Her Last Story: Recovering Kate Chopin's Fiction," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 30, no. 2, 2013.

“Kate Chopin’s Canonical and Market Place: Authorship, Authorization, and Authority,” reprinted in Women’s Writings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Short Stories, edited by Taisha Abraham, PHI Learning, 2013.

“Kate Chopin and the Birth of Young Adult Fiction," Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature, edited by Anne Lundin and Wayne A. Wiegand, Greenwood Press, 2003.

Coloring Locals: Racial Formation in Kate Chopin’s Youth’s Companion Stories, U Iowa P, 2003.

“Kate Chopin and the Periodical: Revisiting the Re-vision,” The Only Efficient Instrument: American Women Writers and the Periodical, edited by Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, U Iowa P, 2001.

“’Lookin’ jis’ like white folks’: Coloring Locals in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Rude Awakening,'" Louisiana Literature, vol. 14, no. 2, 1997.