Laura Heffernan

Laura Heffernan works on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and culture, with a particular focus on histories of reading and histories of literary criticism. She is author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College), of a new disciplinary history of English that focuses on the archival record of what major literary critics taught in their classes throughout the twentieth century, titled The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Portions of and outtakes from the book the have appeared in New Literary History, PMLA, the Modernism/Modernity "Discipline" column, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ACLS News. In 2022, The Teaching Archive won UNF's STARS Award for Best Scholarly Monograph published in the last three years.

Dr. Heffernan has been a core faculty member in UNF's Digital Humanities Institute, which she directed in 2019-2021. In 2021, along with colleagues Dr. Tru Leverette and Dr. Clayton McCarl, Dr. Heffernan received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to complete the Viola Muse Digital Edition, which publishes--for the first time-- the notes and drafts made by Viola Muse, a fieldworker in the Negro Writers Unit of the Florida Federal Writers Program.

Dr. Heffernan received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 and taught at Tulane University and Brown University before joining the faculty here at UNF. In the English department, she teaches courses on the history of the novel, modernist literature, digital methods in literary study, and later periods of British Literature.