Cynthia Klekar-Cunningham

Cynthia Klekar-Cunningham is the Director of the School of Communication and an associate professor of English at Western Michigan University. She joined the faculty in 2005 after receiving her Ph.D. in 18th century literature from West Virginia University.

Klekar-Cunningham has provided leadership in her discipline and at WMU. She is currently co-chair of WMU's Organization for Chairs, Heads, and Directors (OCHAD) and a member of the Multicultural Meet and Greet planning committee. From 2014-2019 she was chief negotiator for the WMU chapter of the American Association of University Professors and led the faculty in successful contract negotiations in 2014 and 2017. Klekar-Cunningham served as editor of Comparative Drama (2005-12), scheduling coordinator for the English department (2011-14), chair of the English department Strategic Planning and Assessment Committee (2016-18), chair of the English department Chair search committee (2011), and co-chair of the College of Arts and Sciences Women’s Caucus Steering Committee (2014-16).

In her scholarship Dr. Klekar-Cunningham was co-editor of The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2009) and is currently working on two projects: a book that examines literary representations of absence in the material world of 18th century England and a co-authored book on displacement in 18th century texts. Her work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Philological Quarterly.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Award (2005), the International Education Faculty Development Grant from the Haenicke Institute for Global Education (2006), the Richard H. Popkin Research Fellowship (2007), and the Paula Backscheider Archival Fellowship (2009), and she presented a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2007.