Laurel Hankins

faculty

Laurel Hankins, PhD she/her

Associate Professor

English & Communication

508-999-9277

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Liberal Arts 337

Education

Tufts UniversityPhD
Tufts UniversityMA
Bryn Mawr CollegeBA

Teaching

  • American Literature to 1865
  • Literary Theory

Teaching

Programs

Teaching

Courses

Survey of African American Literature from colonial times to the turn of the twentieth century. Course surveys genres of poetry, slave narrative, fiction, essay, and drama with attention to the social, political, and cultural histories of African Americans from slavery to freedom to Reconstruction. This course may also include sections on oral narratives (oral slave narratives, speeches, folktales, and sermons) and music (such as sorrow songs and spirituals).

A survey of literature written by people living in what is now the United States from the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century through the Civil War. Readings will include works by indigenous people, settler-colonists, enslaved and self-emancipated people, founding fathers, and burgeoning feminists written across multiple genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction.  

Survey of African American Literature from colonial times to the turn of the twentieth century. Course surveys genres of poetry, slave narrative, fiction, essay, and drama with attention to the social, political, and cultural histories of African Americans from slavery to freedom to Reconstruction. This course may also include sections on oral narratives (oral slave narratives, speeches, folktales, and sermons) and music (such as sorrow songs and spirituals).

Introduction to key primary documents in the history of literary theory, from Plato and Aristotle through contemporary critical theory.

Advanced study in a topic concerning literary texts in any genre, literary history, or literary culture. Areas of focus may include genre studies, literary theory of criticism or other aspect(s) of the creation, production, reception or consumption of literature. Past topics have included: The American Immigrant Experience, Literary Nonfiction, Reading and Writing Nature and Utopian Dreams, among others.

Teaching

Online and Continuing Education Courses

A survey of literature written by people living in what is now the United States from the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century through the Civil War. Readings will include works by indigenous people, settler-colonists, enslaved and self-emancipated people, founding fathers, and burgeoning feminists written across multiple genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction.  

Survey of African American Literature from colonial times to the turn of the twentieth century. Course surveys genres of poetry, slave narrative, fiction, essay, and drama with attention to the social, political, and cultural histories of African Americans from slavery to freedom to Reconstruction. This course may also include sections on oral narratives (oral slave narratives, speeches, folktales, and sermons) and music (such as sorrow songs and spirituals).
Register for this course.

Research

Research activities

  • former President, Charles Brockden Brown Society advisory board (2020-21)

Research

Research interests

  • U.S. Literature to 1865
  • Early U.S. and transatlantic romanticism
  • Sentimental and domestic fiction, especially the novel

Select publications

  • Laurel V. Hankins (2024).
    The Early National Picturesque
    The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
  • Laurel V. Hankins (2023).
    Teaching in Crisis with Absalom Jones and Richard Allen
    Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life
  • Laurel V. Hankins (2012).
    What the Folk Printed: Verse Culture and the Black Press in 1865 New Orleans
    African American Review, 45.4, 527-540.
  • Laurel V. Hankins (2014).
    The Voice of Nature: Hope Leslie and Early American Romanticism
    Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 31.2, 160-182.
  • Laurel V. Hankins (2014).
    The Art of Retreat: Salmagundi's Elbow-Chair Domesticity
    Nineteenth-Century Literature, 71.4, 431-456.

External links