Dr. Dauer teaches and writes about American literature before 1900. Her research and teaching draw on the environmental and health humanities and the history of science in the Atlantic World. Dr. Dauer's classes often focus on race, gender, sexuality, and ideas about the natural world, and she also teaches classes about literature and medicine. She is currently working on a book project examining the ways first-person prose governs the division between human and nonhuman in American literature around 1800. Her public humanities work focuses on the collection of oral histories, and a recent project focused on Covid-19 pandemic experiences has been funded by Indiana Humanities and the Council of Independent Colleges.
