Overview
Laura Brown holds the John Wendell Anderson chair and has served as chair of the Department of Literatures in English, director of the English PhD program, Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Professor Brown is a scholar and critic of eighteenth-century literary culture. She has published seven books and an edited volume, and many critical essays. Professor Brown studies posthumanism and the “counterhuman,” other-than-human beings and species difference, and the engagement with environmental and geological force in eighteenth-century literary culture. Her most recent books—The Counterhuman Imaginary: Storms, Pets, and Traveling Coinage and Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in Modern Literary Imagination—explore the impact of the other-than-human on human creativity.
Research Focus
- Posthumanism
- Animal Studies
- Eighteenth-Century British