Tessa Karsten (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies at the University of Amsterdam within the interdisciplinary project “In Our Own Words: Language, Life Story-Telling, and Empowerment in the United States.” She researches lesbian literary activism in the Feminist Bookstore Network during the last quarter of the 20th century. In combining a queer-feminist historical and literary perspective—looking both at the literary works they championed as well as ego-documentation and archival materials—her project aims to reveal how lesbian feminist literary networks functioned as both cultural resistance and community-building mechanisms in response to mainstream exclusion. The project traces how lesbian feminists engaged in self-representation through cultural production and distribution networks that resisted hegemonic narratives, foregrounding these “bookwomen” not only as cultural producers but also as archivists, publishers, and activists who redefined what literary and political visibility could mean.
Tessa holds an M.A. in North American Studies and Literary Studies from Leiden University and a B.A. in English Language and Culture from Utrecht University. Prior to joining the UvA, Tessa worked as a language assistant in Dutch at the University of Lille in France. She is the current Co-Editor-in-Chief of FRAME Journal of Literary Studies. Read More.
