Kelsey specializes in film studies, focusing primarily on textual adaptation. Her dissertation theorizes the queer affect and alterity politics involved in the adaptation of popular and canonical fictional characters, such as Lady Macbeth and Sherlock Holmes, across adaptation networks. In recent years, she has presented her work at the Northeastern Modern Language Association and the International Shakespeare Association conferences.
As a scholar-practitioner trained in acting, playwriting, screenwriting, and cinematography, Kelsey uses her research and teaching to explore the potential of creative practice to serve as an alternate avenue for literary analysis. During spring 2019, she participated in the BC Theatre Department's "Devised Theater: Exploring Identity" course, completing an individual project that applied devised theatre tools to the practice of screenwriting with the goal of producing more nuanced representation of marginalized groups. As a teacher at BC, she encourages her students to adapt course texts into different mediums to construct social commentary. Past student projects have included a PSA about campus sexual assault based on a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, a gender-swapped Macbeth rap video, and a comedy sketch about silenced female voices in the classroom. She is also interested in using teaching to create safe, queer-positive spaces for BC students.
Kelsey currently works as a learning technology assistant at the Center for Teaching Excellence, and has previously served as a co-director of the PhD program's pedagogy seminar. Her pedagogical interests include diversity & inclusion, collaborative student risk-taking, and formative online/hybrid teaching. She is particularly interested in the use of online annotation assignments to promote more rigorous and collaborative close reading practices and to amplify the voices of students who are typically quiet in the physical classroom.
At BC, Kelsey has taught First-Year Writing, Literature Core (Literature & Adaptation; Queer Drama & Film), and an elective on Shakespearean adaptation. Most recently, she taught FWS and Lit Core during the summer of 2019 as a Summer Session Teaching Fellow at the Woods College.
Before coming to BC, Kelsey graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a B.A. in English. In recent summers, she has taken courses in theatre and film at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Second City, and Maine Media Workshops.
