Lauryl Tucker

Education:

Ph.D., English Language and Literature
University of Virginia, 2008
Dissertation committee: Jahan Ramazani, chair; Jessica Feldman, J. Paul Hunter

M.A., English Language and Literature
University of Virginia, 2004
Qualifying exams: Anglo-American Modernism 1880-1945, 20th-Century Poetics

B.A., summa cum laude, English and History (both with Honors)
University of the South, 1999           
Grade of “Distinction” on final comprehensive exams in English and History

Teaching and Research Interests:

Modernism,  20th-Century and Fin de Siècle British literature, Poetry and Poetics, Gender Studies, Feminism and Humor,  Theories of the Comic, Modern Drama,  Postcolonial and Anti-colonial literature of the British Commonwealth, 20th-century American literature

Courses (see syllabi in "Documents" folder):

Introduction to Poetry
Modern British Women Writers
20th-Century British and Irish Poetry
Laughing Matters: Thinking Critically about Gender and Humor (Ithaca Seminar)
20th-Century British Novel

Book in Progress:
Humoring the Feminine: Comic Subversions in 20th-Century Women’s Poetry

Although (and perhaps because) they are such notoriously unstable categories, humor and gender have long been invoked to define, police and fix one another in place.  Into this fraught history, I read the work of four twentieth-century female poets, including Stevie Smith, Louise Bennett, Carol Ann Duffy and Sylvia Plath, for whom humor has been a critical liability as well as a strategic means of revising inherited concepts of femininity.  Specifically, these writers use humor dialogically to represent gender as a comically protean performance or an ironic process of self-poesis.  As well as revealing how pervasively the gendered language of laughter and humor appears in modern cultural theory—from Freud to Fanon, from Bergson to Butler—this study shows more broadly how the comic works in twentieth-century poetics as another trope for the discourses of gender, nation and art, one that represents these as contingent, unstable and performed phenomena. 

Extracurricular Hobbies & Interests:

When I'm not reading and writing, I enjoy cooking, whitewater kayaking, playing Scrabble, watching college hoops and playing outdoors with our dogs (Seamus and Cory).