{"id":6389,"date":"2018-08-29T13:36:05","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T17:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/?post_type=profile&p=6389"},"modified":"2022-02-01T09:39:26","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T14:39:26","slug":"laura-korobkin","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/profile\/laura-korobkin\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Korobkin"},"content":{"rendered":"

For CV\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n

My scholarship and teaching focus primarily on 19th<\/sup> 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\u2019s presentation of the Puritan criminal justice system in The Scarlet Letter<\/i>, Hurston\u2019s handling of self-defense in Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/i>, Brown\u2019s use of trial structure, evidence, and concepts of insanity and murder in Wieland<\/i>, and Stowe\u2019s insertion of the complete text of an important antislavery court decision into Dred. <\/i> Recently I have begun to work on the transatlantic context in which 19th<\/sup>-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-19th<\/sup> century, investigating how each borrowed from and reacted against the other\u2019s 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-19th<\/sup> C to contemporary), marriage and money in American fiction, and a new course called \u201cJane Eyre\u2019s American Sisters,\u201d studying novels from 1850 to 1980 that respond to and reinvent the strategies and substance of Bronte\u2019s fiction. I also teach survey courses in 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> century American fiction and American literature more broadly, including poetry and nonfiction.<\/p>\n

Selected Publications<\/h5>\n
    \n
  • \u201cSomething Within the Silent Black Man Answered \u2018No!\u2019; or, Is Bartleby Uncle Tom on Wall Street?\u201d ESQ<\/em> 65.4 (Winter 2019): 562-601.<\/li>\n
  • \u201cAvoiding \u2018Aunt Tomasina\u2019: Charles Dickens Responds To Black American Reader Mary Webb.\u201d ELH<\/em> 82.1 (2015): 115-140.<\/li>\n
  • \u201cWilliam Dean Howells\u2019s Deserted Wife: E.D.E.N. Southworth, A Modern Instance<\/em>, and Sentimental Divorce Narration.\u201d American Literature<\/em> 86.2 (2014): 333-360.<\/li>\n
  • \u201cImagining State and Federal Law in Pauline E. Hopkins\u2019s Contending Forces,<\/em>\u201d Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers<\/em> 28.1 (2011): 1-23.<\/li>\n
  • \u201cAppropriating Law in Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Dred<\/em>,\u201d Nineteenth-Century Literature<\/em> 62.3 (December, 2007): 380-406.<\/li>\n
  • \u201c\u2019Can your volatile daughter ever acquire your wisdom?,\u2019 Luxury and False Ideals in The Coquette<\/em>,\u201d Early American Literature<\/em> 41.1 (March 2006): 79-107.<\/li>\n
  • \u201cLegal Narratives of Self-Defense and Self-Effacement in Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>,\u201d Studies In American Fiction<\/em> 31 (Spring, 2003): 3-28.<\/li>\n
  • “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and Judgment in Wieland<\/em>.” American Literature<\/em> 72 (December 2000): 719-749.
    \nReprinted in<\/strong> Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist<\/em>, Ed. Bryan Waterman. Norton Critical Edition (W.W. Norton, 2010).<\/li>\n
  • Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery<\/em>. Columbia University Press (1998).<\/li>\n
  • “The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice.” Novel<\/em> (Winter 1997): 193-217.
    \nReprinted in<\/strong> Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings<\/em>, Ed. Leland S. Person. \u00a0 Norton Critical Edition.\u00a0 (W.W. Norton, 2005).<\/li>\n
  • “The Maintenance of Mutual Confidence: Sentimental Strategies at the Adultery Trial of Henry Ward Beecher.” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities<\/em> 7(Winter 1995): 1-48.<\/li>\n
  • “Affirmative Action and the Harvard College Diversity-Discretion Model: Paradigm or Pretext?” Co-author with Alan M. Dershowitz. Cardozo Law Review<\/em> 1(Fall 1979): 379-424.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    Work in Progress<\/h5>\n
      \n
    • I am working on a book project about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
      Honors, Grants, and Awards<\/h5>\n
        \n
      • Fulbright Lecturer, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (2009)<\/li>\n
      • Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford (2001)<\/li>\n
      • Bunting Institute Fellow (1994\u201395)<\/li>\n
      • Fellow, Pembroke Center for Research, Brown University (1993\u201394)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"author":12176,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/6389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12176"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/6389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7335,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/6389\/revisions\/7335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}