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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

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).

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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