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 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. She is also the co-editor with Josh Lambert of “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies,” a special issue of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (Summer 2012). Her 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, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and The James Joyce Quarterly. 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 MLA’s Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen.

Lori is currently the book review editor of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. In Spring 2016, she was a scholar-in- residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. In 2016, she was also awarded a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Robert E. Levinson Fellowship from the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley to support research on her manuscript West of the Ghetto: Pioneering Women Writers, Progressive Era San Francisco, and Jewish Literary History. This book tells the stories of now forgotten late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jewish women writers from the Western United States. Other scholarly projects include an edition of Miriam Michelson’s writings titled The Superwoman and Other Writings: Fiction and Journalism by Miriam Michelson.

At BC she has taught the First-Year Writing Seminar, Creative Nonfiction, Literature as Testimony, Traditions and Counter-traditions, Studies in Narrative, Introduction to American Studies, Making and Remaking Americans, American Literary History II, and an advanced topics seminar on “Friendship, Love, and Social Taboo.”