Laura Stevens

Education

PhD, 1998, University of Michigan

MA, 1994, University of Michigan

BA, 1991, Villanova University 

About Me

Laura Stevens is Professor of English and Director of the Honors College, having moved to Auburn University in 2024 after 25 years at The University of Tulsa. Her research deals primarily with the British Atlantic world from the mid-seventeenth through eighteenth centuries, with emphases on Indigenous writings, literatures of contact and colonialism, religious writings, and emotion studies. Her scholarship has been supported by the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the James Carter Brown Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Obama Center for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, and the Fulbright Foundation. She was Editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature from 2005 to 2014 (Co-Editing with Jennifer Airey for 2015-16), for which she received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. She currently serves on the International Scientific Advisory Board (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat) for the Interdisciplinary Center for Research of the European Enlightenment (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung) at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and is on the editorial or advisory boards for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 

She is completing work on Eighteenth-Century Guides to Reading the Bible (under contract with Cambridge University Press, Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections Series), and her book Friday’s Tribe: Eighteenth-Century British Missionary Fantasies has been accepted for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2020 she founded “The PSIG Project: Identifying and Honoring the Students of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, the Indigenous Boarding School that became the University of Tulsa” (psigproject.org), for which she continues to serve as an advisor. This project, which proceeds in collaboration with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, trains students at the University of Tulsa to research and write biographies of the approximately 115 students who attended The Presbyterian School for Indian Girls from 1882 to 1894. 

Areas of Expertise

Early American, Restoration & Eighteenth-Century British and Indigenous Literature; Religious Literature; Missionary Encounters & Writings; Emotion Studies

Publications

Books

Friday’s Tribe: Eighteenth-Century English Missionary Fantasies, 120,000 words, accepted for publication, University of Pennsylvania Press,

The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, paperback 2006).

Recent Book Chapters and Articles

“‘Their Own Happiness’: The Ownership of Enslaved Africans’ Emotions in William Warburton’s SPG Sermon.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 54.2 (2021), 285-305.

“How to Read Gender in Early America.” The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature, Bryce Traister, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 68-82.

“The Virgin Mary and Violated Mothers in British and Colonial Anti-Catholicism.” Against Popery: Britain, Empire and Anti-Catholicism, Evan Haefeli, ed., (University of Virginia Press, 2020), 156-77.

“The New Pilgrim’s Progress, The Female American, und die Entstehung narrativer Formen gegen die Erweckungsbewegung,” (“The New Pilgrim’s Progress, The Female American, and the Crafting of an Anti-Revivalist Narrative Form”), trans. Christoph Richter and Sabine Volk-Birke. Die Erzählung der Aufklärung, (The Narrating of Enlightenment) Studium zum 18. Jahrhundert, Volume 38 (ed. Frauke Berndt and Daniel Fulda (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2018), 309-20.

“Mary’s Magnificat in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” The Journal of Religious History, Literature, and Culture, 3.2 (2017), 91-107.