Lauren LaFauci
Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities
Lauren LaFauci is working on a manuscript, "Peculiar Natures" focused on the related histories of racial formation and environment in the pre-Civil War United States, and she is part of the interdisciplinary team behind the citizen humanities project Herbaria 3.0, which shares stories about the intertwined relationships between plants and people.
Lauren’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the Harrison Institute for American History, Literature, and Culture, among others. She holds a Ph.D in English from the University of Michigan and serves as an international liaison for ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.
Book Manuscript in progress (proposal under review at University of North Carolina Press)
Peculiar Natures: Slavery, Embodiment, and Nationalism in the Southern States, 1789-1865
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Under Revision. With Tina Gianquitto. “Ephemerality, Memory, and Durability in Digital Environmental Storytelling.”
With Tina Gianquitto. “A Case Study in Citizen Environmental Humanities: Creating a Participatory Plant Story Website.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 12 (2022): 327-340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-021-00744-8
(In Swedish) Att lida av klimatet: Plats, kropp och sjukdom i euro-amerikansk tanketradition (To Suffer from the Climate: Place, Embodiment, and Disease in Euro-American Thought.) Inom/Utom: Kropp, själ och samhälle i medicinens gränsland, förr och nu. (Inside/Outside: Body, Soul, and Society in the Borderlands of Medicine, Then and Now.) Exempla: Jonköping, Sweden, 2021. pp. 46-53.
Climate Theories. In Climate and American Literature, ed. Michael Boyden. Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. pp. 41-57.
Unraveling Slavery’s Order in the Nineteenth-Century Southern Swamp. Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies. Eds. Kirstin Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Anthony Wilson. Southern Literary Studies Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. pp. 189-202.
“The Safest Place on Earth”: Cultural Imaginaries of Safety in Scandinavia. Lead article. Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment. Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures. Eds. Reinhard Hennig, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman. Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 2018. pp. 21-37.
“Encountering Early American Environments.” (Review Essay) Early American Literature 51.2 (Summer 2016): 461-476.
Taking the (Southern) Waters: Science, Slavery, and Nationalism at the Virginia Springs. Lead article. Anthropology and Medicine 18.1 (April 2011): 7-22. Special Issue: “Healing Holidays?: Itinerant Patients, Therapeutic Locales, and the Quest for Health.”
A Divided Portrait: Versions of Wilderness in Timothy O’Sullivan’s Survey Photography. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 7.1 (October 2005): 71-83. Special Issue: “New Connections in Ecocriticism.”
Website, Collaboratively Authored and Produced
Herbaria 3.0. Everyone has a story to tell about a plant? What’s yours? www.herbaria3.org
Launched April 2018. >26,000 views from people in >130 countries (as of May 2021).
- Edited and maintained by Project Leader Tina Gianquitto. Assisted by Lauren LaFauci,
who also writes and edits for the site and its associated social media. - Dawn Sanders, Maura Flannery, and Terry Hodge worked with Gianquitto and LaFauci in
initial site creation and development as equal participants in all aspects.
Ph.D., M.A., English Language and Literature
University of Michigan
2009
Washington and Lee University
B.A., English; German Language; concentration in Natural Sciences
2001