Laura M. Stevens

laura Stevens

Associate Professor of EnglishEditor, Tulsa Studies in Women’s LiteratureZink Hall 341
(918)631-2859
laura-stevens@utulsa.eduPersonal Page

I work on colonial American and British literature of the long eighteenth century, specializing in the transatlantic circulation of texts and ideas, religious literature, the culture of sensibility, women’s writing, and depictions of American Indians. I am writing a book titled “Daughters of Israel: Biblical Women and British Identities in Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Literature.”

Education and Degrees Earned

  • BA, Philosophy and Honors Program, Villanova University, 1991
  • MA, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 1994
  • Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 1998

Professional Affiliations

  • American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • American Studies Association
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • McNeil Center for Early American Studies
  • Modern Language Association
  • North American Conference on British Studies
  • Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
  • Society for the Study of American Women Writers
  • Society of Early Americanists
  • South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (former president)
  • Scottish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Courses Taught at TU

  • Greek History, Philosophy, and Drama (HON 1003)
  • Renaissance Europe (HON 1013)
  • Reading Major British Writers I (ENGL 2503)
  • Restoration and 18th-Century Literature (ENGL 3453)
  • The British Novel I: Defoe to the Brontës (ENGL 4483)
  • Senior Project (ENGL 4973)
  • 18th-Century British Fiction (ENGL 7223)
  • Women and Writing in the British Atlantic World (ENGL 8133)
  • Special Topics in Literature before 1800: "Writing Revolution in the British Atlantic World" (ENGL 8173)
  • Proseminar (ENGL 8203)

Awards & Recognition

  • University of Tulsa Outstanding Teaching Award
  • Gilcrease Museum Faculty Summer Fellowship
  • Mortar Board, Scotch and Smokes Teaching Award, University of Tulsa
  • Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship, Huntington Library
  • Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
  • Oklahoma Humanities Council Research Grants
  • Phillips Fund Research Fellowship, American Philosophical Society
  • Presidential Prize South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Society of Early Americanists Essay Award

Publications

  • The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility
    (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, paperback 2006)
  • “The Souls of Highlanders, the Salvation of Indians: Scottish Mission and Eighteenth-Century British Empire,”
    in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of Early America’s Religious Landscape, edited by Mark A. Nicholas and Joel Martin, 2010, University of North Carolina Press.
  • Why Read Sermons? What Americanists Can Learn from the Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts
    History Compass 3 (2005) NA 158, 1-19.
  • Reading the Hermit’s Manuscript: The Female American and Female Robinsonades
    In Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe, edited by Carl Fisher and Maximillian Novak (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 140-51.
  • ’Gold for Glasse’: The Trope of Trade in English Missionary Writings
    In The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, edited by James Muldoon (Gainesville, FA: University Press of Florida, 2004), 231-51.
  • Transatlanticism Now
    American Literary History, 16.1 (2004): 93-102. (Review Essay)
  • The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian
    In Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, edited by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 17-30.
  • Civility and Skepticism in the Woolston-Sherlock Debate over Miracles
    Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (1997): 57-70.