Laura S. Brown
LAURA S. BROWN (BA Stanford '71; PhD '77 University of California, Berkeley) is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University, and has just finished a term as chair of the Department of English. She joined the Cornell faculty in 1981 after teaching at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Brown served as director of graduate studies in English from 1985 to 1988, was a member of the department's appointments committee for Asian American literature in 1991 and for Native American literature in 1999, and was appointed to the John Wendell Anderson Chair in 2002.
She received the Regents fellowship from the University of California, and has twice been the recipient of a faculty fellowship from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.
Professor Brown's scholarly interests include Restoration and 18th-century English literature; generic history, ideology, and form; feminist criticism; and Marxist criticism. She is widely recognized as a scholar and critic of the English 18th century. Her own work includes studies of women's roles in the literary imagination; the relationship between literature and history; the nature of culture; the emergence of imperialist thought; and the effects of ideas of racial difference. She is an active teacher and advisor in graduate studies at Cornell and is the author or editor of five books, which treat a range of genres and ideas in 18th-century literary culture.
In addition to her Cornell activities, she has served on several committees of the Modern Language Association.