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Laurel Hankins

faculty

Laurel Hankins, PhD she/her

Associate Professor

English & Communication

Contact

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

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.  

A study of English Neo-classical and Pre-romantic writings by Dryden, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, and others.

Teaching

Online and Continuing Education Courses

A study of English Neo-classical and Pre-romantic writings by Dryden, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, and others.
Register for this course.

Research

Research activities

  • The Art of Retreat: Domestic Romanticisms in the Early United States, monograph under contract with Bucknell University Press
  • 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 (2025).
    The Art of Retreat: Domestic Romanticisms in the Early United States

  • Laurel V. Hankins (2024).
    The Early National Picturesque
    The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art
  • 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.

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