Women's and Gender Studies Program

Lori Merish is an Associate Professor of English. Her research and teaching interests are in 19th-C American Literature and Culture; Multi-Ethnic American Literatures; American and Anglophone Caribbean Women Writers; Literature and Politics; Feminist and Materialist Theories; and Working-class literature and culture.

She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and B.S. from the College of William and Mary.

Publications she has written include: Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and 19th-C American Literature (Duke UP, 2000); selected articles on Stowe, Wharton, Kirkland, John Rollin Ridge, Phelps, class and sexuality, the feminization of poverty in antebellum literature.

She is currently completing a book on antebellum working-class women and popular fiction, entitled Laboring Women and the Languages of Class: Race, Sex, and Working Class Women's Writings, 1830-1860; the book is will be published by Duke University Press.

Merish also has won a variety of honors, grants and awards, including: a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship; a Mellon Fellowship, English Department, Stanford University; a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship; a U. C. Berkeley Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellowship; and the A. S. A.'s Constance Rourke Award for best article in American Quarterly (1993).