Laura Korobkin

Research Areas: 19th-century American fiction; intersections of law and narrative; women writers; transatlantic relations

My scholarship and teaching focus primarily on 19^th century American fiction, with a special interest in women writers, intersections of law and narrative, and reading literature in a transatlantic context. I was a lawyer before becoming an English professor, and much of my scholarship uses a historically informed study of law to analyze literary works. I have written about such matters as Hawthorne’s presentation of the Puritan criminal justice system in The Scarlet Letter, Hurston’s handling of self-defense in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Brown’s use of trial structure, evidence, and concepts of insanity and murder in Wieland, and Stowe’s insertion of the complete text of an important antislavery court decision into Dred. Recently I have begun to work on the transatlantic context in which 19^th-century fiction was written and read. My current project is a book about the creative rivalry between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens, the two best-selling authors in English in the mid-19^th century, investigating how each borrowed from and reacted against the other’s work. Teaching is central to my work. I teach specialized courses and graduate seminars on such topics as American law and narrative (using both legal and literary texts), American ethnic women writers (from mid-19^th C to contemporary), marriage and money in American fiction, and a new course called “Jane Eyre’s American Sisters,” studying novels from 1850 to 1980 that respond to and reinvent the strategies and substance of Bronte’s fiction. I also teach survey courses in 19^th and 20^th century American fiction and American literature more broadly, including poetry and nonfiction.

Selected Publications:
“Avoiding ‘Aunt Tomasina’: Charles Dickens responds to Black American Reader Mary Webb” (forthcoming)

Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth Century Stories of Adultery (Columbia University Press, 1999)

“William Dean Howells’s Deserted Wife: E. D. E. N. Southworth, A Modern Instance, and Sentimental Divorce Narration,” American Literature (2014).

“Imagining State and Federal Law in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” Legacy (2011).

For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Korobkin’s Department Profile.