Kelly Williams

Director, Research and Scholarly Writing

Contact Information

Kelly Williams is director of research and scholarly writing at the CFDE. Her primary areas of responsibility are support for faculty as writers and researchers, including the Scholarly Writing and Publishing Fund, the CFDE Faculty Writing Groups, faculty writing retreats, and public scholarship programming and support.

Kelly is an accomplished scholar whose work spans Shakespeare, pre-modern race studies, the environmental humanities, and XR pedagogies. She earned her doctorate from Emory University, where she specialized in Renaissance literature, and she previously served as a Dean’s Teaching Fellow in CFDE. Kelly joins us at this time from the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech, where she was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow and taught writing and multimodal communication courses. At Georgia Tech, she supported faculty writers as a professional consultant in the Naugle Writing and Communication Center. Her scholarship has appeared in the journals Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture Online, as well as the edited volume, Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance.

Kelly holds a PhD in English from Emory University (2023), an MA in Irish Literature and Culture from Boston College (2017), and a BA in English from the University of Florida (2010).

She is the author of The Distillery, a biweekly Substack column where she distills history's best writing advice in 1,000 words or less. The formula for posts is simple: one notable author, one idea, one technique to try.