Laura White's Profile Image
John E. Weaver Professor of English and Chair of the Undergraduate Program and Curriculum Committee

Selected Publications and Projects

  • The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World (Routledge, 2017)
  • Austen Said: Patterns of Diction in Jane Austen's Novels. Data-mining project.
  • Jane Austen's Anglicanism (Ashgate, 2011)
  • Critical Essays on Jane Austen (G.K. Hall, 1998)
  • Romance, Language, and Education in Jane Austen's Novels (Macmillan, 1988)
  • Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, R.L. Stevenson, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, and Wallace Stevens, among others.

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

Education

Ph.D., Vanderbilt

B.A., Yale

Areas of Interest

19th- and 20th-Century British literature, especially the novel

Jane Austen

Lewis Carroll

Interdisciplinary 19th-century studies

Narrative theory

Genre theory

History of manners

Anglo-American modernism