Lauren LaFauci is assistant professor of environmental humanities at Linköping University (LiU). She holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, specializing in American studies (from 1400 to 1900), environmental humanities, and the history of slavery. She is currently completing Peculiar Natures, a book manuscript on the related histories of racial and environmental ideas in the pre-Civil War United States. Her work has been supported by Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development; the American Philosophical Society; the Andrew Mellon Foundation; the Harrison Institute for the Study of American History, Literature, and Culture at the University of Virginia; and the Franklin Institute for North American Studies at the University of Alcalá, Spain, among other sources. She has taught over 40 different courses in the areas of American studies, environmental humanities, and writing at universities in Germany, Sweden, and the United States, where she also held the position of assistant professor of English, gender studies, and sustainability studies before relocating to Sweden in fall 2015. Lauren is a project leader of Herbaria 3.0, a digital citizen humanities project collecting the intertwined stories of plants and people, and she serves as an international liaison for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
RCC Research Project: On Common Ground: Synthesizing Equitable Environmental Humanities for Climate Change Action
Selected Publications:
- "Unraveling Slavery's Order in the Nineteenth-Century Southern Swamp." In Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies, edited by Kirstin Squint, Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Anthony Wilson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020.
- "Climate Theories." Climate in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Michael Boyden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- "'The Safest Place on Earth': Cultural Imaginaries of Safety in Scandinavia." Nordic Narratives of Nature and Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, edited by Reinhard Hennig, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books (Roman & Littlefield), 2018.
- With Tina Gianquitto, Dawn Sanders, Maura Flannery, and Terry Hodge. Herbaria 3.0. https://www.herbaria3.org. Launched April 2018.
- "Encountering Early American Environments." Early American Literature 51, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 461-476.