English Department Faculty

Lori Harrison-Kahan specializes in American literature and culture, women’s writing, and comparative race and ethnic studies. A recipient of the American Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars and Contingent Faculty, she is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson (Wayne State University Press, 2019) and author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (Rutgers University Press/American Literatures Initiative, 2011), which received an honorable mention for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Her article “Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West,” co-authored by Karen E. H. Skinazi, was awarded the Don D. Walker Prize for best essay in Western American literary studies. She is the book review editor of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and she co-edited a special issue of the journal on “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies” (Summer 2012).

Lori is currently working on a book manuscript titled “West of the Ghetto: Pioneering Women Writers, Progressive Era San Francisco, and Jewish Literary Culture,” which tells the stories of now forgotten late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jewish women writers from the Western United States. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Modernist Studies Association. In 2016, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and a Robert E. Levinson Fellow at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Other scholarly projects include an edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf with Barbara Cantalupo and Socialist Sisters, a collection of writings by Anna and Rose Strunsky.

Lori’s essays and book reviews have been published in American Historical Review, American Jewish History, Callaloo, Cinema Journal, Jewish Social Studies, Journal of American History, Legacy, MELUS, Modern Drama, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Language Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Her work also appears in the anthologies Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature; Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion; Passing Interest: Racial Passing in U.S. Fiction, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990-2010; The Race and Media Reader; The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction; and The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism. She has contributed essays on teaching Jewish American and African American literature to the Modern Language Association’s volumes Options for Teaching Jewish American Literature and Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen. She is on the editorial board of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women and serves as a consultant reader for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

At BC, Lori teaches courses on American literature and culture, including “Introduction to American Studies,” “Scribbling Women and Suffragettes: Human Rights and American Women’s Writing, 1850-1920,” “Reading In/Justice: Literature as Activism from Abolition to #BlackLivesMatter,” “Friendship, Love, and Social Taboo,” “American Literary History II,” “Literature as Testimony,” and “Hamilton and American Culture.” She also teaches the First-Year Writing Seminar and Creative Nonfiction.