Laura White

Professor and Vice Chair

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Yale, BA
• Vanderbilt, PhD

Professional Areas of Specialty

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, especially the novel; narrative theory; genre theory; history of manners; Anglo-American modernism; Jane Austen; interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies.

Selected publications and/or projects

• Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen's Novels (Macmillan, 1988)
• Critical Essays on Jane Austen (G.K. Hall, 1998)
• Jane Austen's Anglicanism (Ashgate, 2011)
• Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, R.L. Stevenson, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, and Wallace Stevens, among others.
• Alice and the Victorian Culture Wars (book in progress)

Courses taught

• Undergraduate courses: University Freshman Honors Seminar (Manners and Cultural Codes); University Senior Honors Seminar (Jane Austen; Comedy and Tragedy); Introduction to English Studies; Introduction to Poetry; Shakespeare; Children’s Literature; Composition and Literature; Twentieth-Century Fiction; Intermediate Composition; Women in Popular Culture; English Authors After 1800 (regular and Honors versions); British Authors After 1800: The Mystery and Gothic Tradition; Twentieth-Century Women’s Literature; Introduction to Women’s Literature; Jane Austen; Modern Fiction; Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Victorian Novelists; Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Poetry and Non-fiction Prose; The Novel: 1700-1900; Literary Criticism; English Capstone: Modernity.

• Graduate courses: Literary Criticism; Nineteenth-Century British Literature; The Nineteenth-Century British Novel; The Nineteenth-Century British Novel: The Gothic Tradition; The American Short Story; Modern Fiction; Teaching the Novel; Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Nineteenth Century (cotaught with Benjamin Rader, History; Ken Winkle, History; Wendy Katz, Art History); Interdisciplinary Themes in the Nineteenth Century: Manners and Class; Jane Austen; Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature (for spring 2012).