Contact Information:
252C Bartlett Hall
UMass
Amherst, MA 0l003
p: 413-545-0644
f: 413-545-3880
ldoyle@english.umass.edu
Last Modified: August 2008 |
Professor and Associate Dean, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; she arrived in 1995, after seven years as Assistant Professor at Harvard University. She holds a B.A. with Honors in English from Beloit College (1979), an M.A. from the University of Illinois (1981), and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University (1987). Active in University governance, Doyle is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department. Over the years she has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship (1991), a Five College Women's Studies Research Associateship (1991), a Rockefeller Fellowship in Intercultural Studies at Princeton (1993), and most recently, the Outstanding Teacher Award at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2003).
Doyle's book publications include Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford 1994, recipient of the Narrative Society's Perkins Prize); as editor, Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture (Northwestern 2001); and as co-editor, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Indiana UP, 2005). She has published numerous essays on race and narrative, on authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Laurence Sterne to Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen. She also has a special interest in the existential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work influences much of her writing on the body and culture.
Doyle's current projects include a multi-century study of the Atlantic novel as it emplots notions of liberty and race, and a book-length essay on cubism in art and fiction, informed by the philosophies of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty.
At the University of Massachusetts, in the undergraduate program Doyle teaches everything from the gateway course for English majors and a required multicultural course in "American Identities" to special undergraduate seminars such topics as modernism, women writers, and the novel. She also teaches a range of graduate seminars, including on literary and cultural theory, race studies, the body, modernism, and George Eliot. Doyle has for several years been actively involved in the University's Center for Teaching. Having spent a year as a Lilly Teaching Fellow (1999-00) at the Center, she has since offered workshops on leading discussion and has facilitated a campus-wide Faculty Book Club on books related to teaching and the university. Doyle loves the synergy of teaching and research; and she considers committee work at the University as a form of educational activism.
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