Dr. Laura Fisher
Biography:
Laura Fisher is a writer and scholar specializing in early twentieth-century U.S. literature and culture. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American Literature and the literature and culture of cities.
Dr. Fisher is currently working on a book that tells the story of a young sex worker from San Francisco who wrote a tell-all memoir, only for the pages to become a flashpoint in America鈥檚 early struggle over sexuality, censorship, feminism, and labor before vanishing for more than a century. Girl on the Line: A Story of Sex, Vice, and the Lost Memoir that Helped Shape Modern America will be published by Pantheon (US) and McClelland and Stewart (Canada). She is the author of Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), a literary history of social reform institutions in the United States, and the editor of Kate Chopin鈥檚 1899 feminist novel The Awakening (Norton Library, 2023). Dr. Fisher鈥檚 research has been published in American Literature, American Literary History, College Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, MELUS, Modern Language Quarterly, and elsewhere.
In addition to her scholarly writing, Dr. Fisher writes cultural criticism on such topics as riot grrrl, popular music and culture, and contemporary literature for publications such as The Guardian, The New Inquiry, Avidly鈥擫os Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. She has also produced a digital and public humanities project entitled City of Words, which she uses as a tool for teaching urban literatures in Toronto and beyond.
Dr. Fisher鈥檚 research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the University of Chicago Library.
Selected Publications
鈥淯S Literary Institutions, Then and Now.鈥� College Literature 51.4 (Fall 2024)
The Awakening. Kate Chopin. Edited and introduction, annotations, and appendix by Laura R. Fisher. New York: The Norton Library, 2023.
鈥淲hite Slave Fiction, So-Called.鈥� American Literary History 33.1 (Spring 2021)
Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019
鈥淨uiet Storm: Why Juliana Hatfield鈥檚 Hey Babe roared as loud as the riot grrrls.鈥� The Guardian, March 31, 2018
鈥淐harlotte Perkins Gilman鈥檚 Novel Aesthetics.鈥� MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 78.4 (November 2017)
鈥淚mmigration鈥檚 Daughters.鈥� Public Books, September 27, 2017
鈥淧ossible Futures and Grammatical Politics in James Baldwin鈥檚 Another Country.鈥� JML: Journal of Modern Literature 41.4 (Fall 2017)
鈥淗ead and Hands Together: Booker T. Washington鈥檚 Vocational Realism.鈥� American Literature 87.3 (December 2015)
鈥淐arrie Brownstein Gives Me a Heart Attack.鈥� Avidly鈥擫os Angeles Review of Books, December 15, 2015
鈥淪parkle, Shirley, Sparkle!鈥� The New Inquiry, March 3, 2014
鈥淢inor Feelings.鈥� The New Inquiry, July 1, 2013
鈥淲riting Immigrant Aid: The Settlement House and the Problem of Representation.鈥� MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 37.2 (Summer 2012)