Katie Gemmill is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Vassar College. Her research concerns the form of the 18th-century English novel, with a special focus on literary representations of speech and conversation.
Katie Gemmill
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Writing on Public Books
HBO Gets High (Maintenance)
The new season of High Maintenance premieres on HBO tonight. For those who don’t know it, the series was created by Katja Blichfeld and her husband, Ben Sinclair, who also stars as the main character—a bike-riding marijuana dealer who makes house calls all over New York (though mainly Brooklyn), known only as “The Guy.” Each […]
Must We Have Lives?
“Hermione Lee was very kind,” Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote of the woman who would later become her biographer. “Although she clearly thinks I am hopeless about feminism, and says this is the generation gap.” This anecdote appears nearly four hundred pages into Lee’s recent biography of Fitzgerald, nestled in a cluster of quotations meant to […]
Mysteryland
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “I have come here to lose the smog,” Joni Mitchell sings in her trademark falsetto, “and I feel to be a cog in something turning.” Her imagined destination (and the song’s namesake) is Woodstock, the year 1969. Forty-five […]
Toads and Bitches
“At last, something beautiful you can truly own,” says Don Draper, pitching to Jaguar executives in the fifth season of Mad Men. This idea of owning a woman is tempered here by metaphor: the car only stands in for the woman. Male ownership of her remains, albeit tenuously, a fantasy. Not so in the case […]
