
Laura Korobkin
korobkin@bu.edu
Associate Professor; Director of Graduate Studies. B.A., Williams; M.A., Brandeis; J.D., Harvard Law School; Ph.D. in English, Harvard
Teaching and Research Interests: American literature, especially fiction, relations of narrative to law, women writers.
Selected Publications: Criminal Conversations: Stories of Adultery and the Law in Late 19th-century America (Columbia UP, 1998); “Appropriating Law in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007); “‘Can your volatile daughter ever acquire your wisdom?’: Luxury and False Ideals in The Coquette,” Early American Literature (2006); “Law and the American Novel,” A Companion to American Fiction 1780-1865 (2004); “Legal Narratives of Self-Defense and Self-Effacement in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Studies in American Fiction (2003); “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and Judgment in Wieland,” American Literature (2000); “The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice,” Novel (1997; reprinted in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, Norton Critical Edition. [2005]); “Narrative Battles in the Courtroom,” in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Marjorie Garber, Rebecca Walkowitz, Paul Franklin (1996); “The Maintenance of Mutual Confidence: Sentimental Strategies at the Adultery Trial of Henry Ward Beecher,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 7 (1995).
Work in Progress: Book project on marriage and money in American fiction.
Honors, Grants, and Awards: Fulbright Lecturer, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (2009); Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford (2001); Bunting Institute Fellow (1994-95); Fellow, Pembroke Center for Research, Brown University (1993-4).