Karen Ramirez is an Assistant Director for Humanities/Arts/Social Sciences and Senior Instructor for the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program. She teaches courses on The American West, Women’s Literature, Native American Literature, and American Literature. Ramirez co-founded and directs the CU Dialogues Program, which facilitates dialogues in CU classes in order to provide experiential learning opportunities that complement course content across a range of disciplines. She has received the Dorothy Martin Faculty Award for excellence in teaching and activism concerning women’s issues as well as a Marinus G. Smith award for her impact on CU undergraduate students.
Ramirez received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She researches narrative mappings of place in 19th/20th C. western American literature and how these narrative mappings dialogically intersect with contemporary public memory of western places. Her current research draws on her foundation in dialogism and narrative study as well as her work co-directing the CU Dialogues Program to develop, theorize and study dialogue experiences as a form of engaged learning about cross-cultural perspectives. In 2008, she was the Co-President of the Western Literature Association and hosted the association’s annual conference in Boulder.
Outside of her professional activities, she is a singer with Boulder’s semi-professional a-cappella choir Ars Nova, a jogger, and a camping enthusiast.