Doctoral Student Fellow
Doctoral Student, Department of English, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Pedagogies of Uplift: Reform Institutions and U.S. Literary Production
Laura Fisher completed her doctorate in English and American Literature at NYU. She earned her B.A. at McGill University and her M.A. at NYU. Her dissertation, “Pedagogies of Uplift: Reform Institutions and U.S. Literary Production,” explores the mutual relationship between social reform institutions and American literature in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Looking inside organizations—the settlement house, the working girls’ club, and the African American college—that have rarely been addressed by American literary history, her work seeks to illuminate patterns of cultural production and consumption that took shape at the nexus of professional and intellectual arenas of literature, philanthropy and reform. Laura has an article on the settlement house and Jewish American literature forthcoming in MELUSand an essay forthcoming in a volume on Contact Spaces of American Culture, both in 2012. She is a recipient of the English Department’s Millicent Bell and Carnwath-Callender Fellowships.
Laura is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at NYU.