English Department Faculty

Lori Harrison-Kahan specializes in American literature and culture, women’s writing, and comparative race and ethnic studies. She is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson (Wayne State University Press, 2019), which won the 2021 Best Book Edition Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), and the co-editor, with Barbara Cantalupo, of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf (Wayne State University Press, 2020). Lori’s monograph, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (Rutgers University Press/American Literatures Initiative, 2011), received an honorable mention for the SSAWW Book Award. She is a recipient of the American Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars and Contingent Faculty, and 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.

Lori is currently working on a book manuscript titled “West of the Ghetto: Pioneering Women Writers and Jewish American 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. Current editorial projects include a Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s writings (co-edited with Jane Carr) and a volume of scholarly essays on Jewish women’s writing in the United States (co-edited with Annie Atura Bushnell and Ashley Walters). A former book review editor of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, she co-edited a special issue of the journal on “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies.”

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, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish 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 previously served on the editorial board of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women and currently serves on the editorial board for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

At BC, Lori teaches courses on American literature and culture, including “American Culture: Engaging Difference and Justice,” “Human Rights and American Women’s Writing, 1850-1920,” “Reading In/Justice: Literature as Activism from Abolition to #BlackLivesMatter,” “Literature as Testimony,” and “Hamilton and American Culture.” She also teaches the First-Year Writing Seminar and Creative Nonfiction.