Lauren Coats

Lauren Coats

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Duke University

225-578-3042
lac@lsu.edu
260-K Allen Hall

Biography

Lauren Coats researches and teaches in the fields of early and nineteenth-century American literature as well as digital humanities, with emphasis on archives, travel literature, and the environment. Her work integrates early American literary studies with digital scholarly communications to offer new structural apparatuses for literary scholarship. Her research portfolio thus includes traditional single-authored scholarship as well as collaborative digital humanities and scholarly communications projects. She is completing a book project, “Terra In/Cognita: Mapping the New United States," that examines the creation, publication, and dissemination of exploration narratives in the new nation's first decades. She founded and edits *Archive Journal*, an interdisciplinary journal on the theory and use of archives and special collection in higher education. Coats directs a digital project about nineteenth-century periodicals and authorship in *The Broadway Journal*, a magazine edited by Edgar A. Poe. In addition, she has published several pieces about travel, cartography, and exploration that range in subject from Lewis & Clark's writing on the landscape to readers’ trips to Charlotte Temple’s grave to an eighteenth-century atlas factice.

Area(s) of Interest

Early American Literature, nineteenth-century American literature, digital humanities, literature of travel and exploration, environmental literature, theories of geography and space, theories and use of archives

Curriculum Vitae