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Laurel Hankins

faculty

Laurel Hankins, PhD

she/her

Professor

English & Communication

Contact

508-999-9277

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Balsam Hall 9167

Education

Tufts UniversityPhD
Tufts UniversityMA
Bryn Mawr CollegeBA

Teaching

  • American Literature to 1865
  • Literary Theory

Programs

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.  

Study of literature about the law, criminality, and the legal system, including relevant legal and political documents in conversation with this literature. The fields of law and literature have many similarities, across both objects and methods of study. Designed especially for students interested in the law and the legal profession, the course emphasizes the shared practices of literary and legal studies. 

Online and Continuing Education 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).

Register for this course

Research

Research activities

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

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.

Additional links

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