Dr. Laurie F. Leach
Professor of English
English Department Chair
Education:
Ph.D., English, Louisiana State University, 1990
M.A., English, Louisiana State University, 1987
B.A., English, University of Virginia, 1986
Courses Frequently Taught:
WRI 1200 Research, Argument and Writing
ENG 2301 Banned Books
ENG 3102 Nineteenth-Century British Literature
ENG 3122 Nineteenth-Century American Literature
ENG 3202 Literature of Slavery
ENG 3224 Ethnic Literature
ENG 4120 Seminar in Modernism
HUM 3900 Research and Writing in the Humanities
Publications
Book
Langston Hughes: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2004.
Essays in Collections
“A Fuller Statement of the Case: Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams, Eds. MacFarland, 2010.
“Margie Polite, The Riot Starter: Harlem, 1943.” Part of a collection, Leaping into the Fire: Representations of Women in United States Race Riots, ed. Julie Cary Nerad. Studies in the Literary Imagination (40.2) 2007: 25-48.
“A Nice Girl Ought to Know!”: Henry James’s Daisy Miller.” Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender.
“The Bell Jar: Trapped by the Feminine Mystique.” Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender. Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, eds. Greenwood Press, 2003. 35-37.
“Conflict over Privacy in Indo-American Short Fiction.” Ethnicity and the American Short Story. Ed. Julie Brown. Garland Press, 1997. 197-211.
Articles in Journals
“Lying, Writing and Confrontation: Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 15 (2004): 1-24.
"A Comment on `Teachers and Philosophers.'" College English (February 1995): 84-85.
“Explorations of a ‘Sorry Genre’: Andrew Field's Biographies of Vladimir Nabokov.” Biography 15 (1992): 178-91.
“‘The Difficult Business of Intimacy’: Friendship and Writing in Virginia Woolf's The Waves.” South Central Review 7.2 (1990): 53-66.
"Lorenzo and the Noblest Roman: The Noble Assassins of Lorenzaccio and Julius Caesar." Romance Notes 28 (1988): 241-46.
Current Committee and Administrative Assignments
- English Department Chair
- English Curriculum Committee
- Common Book Committee
Favorite Literary Quotations:
Let us then be up and doing/ With a heart for any fate/
Still achieving still pursuing/Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!
Jane Austen
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
