Expertise
American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Digital Humanities, Cultural Analytics
Biography
Laura B. McGrath specializes in computational literary criticism and contemporary American literature. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Michigan State University. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests focus on American literature post-1945, digital humanities and cultural analytics, literary sociology, and contemporary literary production.
She is at work on a book called Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature, under contract with Princeton University Press and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Middlemen draws on a range of methods- data analysis, close reading, literary ethnography- to reveal the literary agent's centrality in the development of American literature, post-1945.
Her work has been published in New Literary History, American Literary History, Post45, CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980 2020. She is the recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature, awarded to the best essay by an untenured scholar in 2021, for her essay "Literary Agency," published in ALH. Her public writing has appeared The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and Post45:Contemporaries. She is one of the founding co-editors of the Post45 Data Collective, and the co-editor of the "Culture Industries" section of Public Books.
She has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Public Library, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Smithsonian Institute of American History. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation , ACLS, and the Big Ten.
Selected Publications
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
- “Books About Race.” New Literary History, vol 53, Number 4, Autumn 2022 / Volume 54, Number 1, Winter 2023.
- “Literary Agency.” American Literary History, vol 33, issue 2, 2021. Awarded the 1921 Prize in American Literature, best article.
- “Voice,” with Nika Mavrody, Nichole Nomura, and Alexander Sherman. Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics.
Public Writing
- “Lauren Groff and the Radical Act of Paying Attention.” Review of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. Public Books. December 5, 2023.
- “The Haunting of the Publishing House.” Review of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. The Nation. October 13, 2023.
- “The Work of the Audiobook.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, with Alexander Manshel and J.D. Porter. May 16, 2023.
- “The Rise of Must-Read TV,” The Atlantic, with Alexander Manshel and J.D. Porter. July 16, 2021.
- “Who Cares About Literary Prizes?” Public Books, with Alexander Manshel and J.D. Porter. September 3, 2019.
- “Comping White,” The Los Angeles Review of Books. Named by LARB Editors as a “Best of the Humanities” essay, and a Most Read in 2019. January 21, 2019.
Podcasts and Author Interviews
- + Novel Dialogue, “Attention Is Love”: A Conversation with Lauren Groff
- + In conversation with Emily St. John Mandel. Podcast | Video. Free Library of Philadelphia. March 28, 2023
- + American Vandal, Criticism in the Conglomerate Era
- + American Vandal, BookTube, BookTok, Wattpad, & The Audible Creation Exchange
- + BookFight, ep. 419: Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us
- + In conversation with Orhan Pamuk, Free Library of Philadelphia. October 20, 2022
- + BookFight, ep. 396: Jacqueline Susann, The Valley of the Dolls
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Courses Taught
- Contemporary American Literature
- Digital Text Methods
- Popular Fiction