Laura Runge

Professor of English

CONTACT

Office: CPR 358-C
Phone: 813-974-9496
Email

EDUCATION

  • PhD, Emory University (English with certificate in Women鈥檚 Studies)

BIO

Newly published:   with OA data hosted by the USF Scholar Commons: 

Aphra Behn (1640鈥�1689), a prolific and popular playwright, poet, novelist, and translator, has an extensive corpus of literature that plays a key role in literary history as the work of a female author. Based upon word counts, Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn chronicles Behn鈥檚 obsession with the mystery and power of love and early modern passions through her entire oeuvre. Love, for Behn, is an external power, sometimes figured as the boy god Cupid or an abstraction, that enters the body with pain and pleasure and leaves the victim searching for understanding. The book follows two threads of argument: one using quantitative measures to indicate passages for significant close reading of preferred language and the other focused upon her use of small words like thou, sir, or said. Situating her writings in the conflicts of early modern discourses on the passions, the book demonstrates that Behn鈥檚 language reveals generic patterns for representing love that include a warning about its potential to destroy the body and condemn the soul. Taken as a whole, Behn鈥檚 literary production is an extraordinary examination of the early modern concept of love at a moment of change in the language and meaning of the passions.

I specialize in Restoration and Eighteenth-century British Literature, Women Authors, Book History, Digital Humanities, and to a lesser degree pedagogy.  I have published eight books, as well as articles, book chapters, essays, digital projects, and reviews.  My intellectual home is the late seventeenth century, and my analytic focus is historical, intersectional, and feminist with a particular interest in form, nonfictional prose (such as letters and essays), criticism, and archival work.  My contemporary interests include mindfulness and digital publication and media transformation (manuscript to print and print to digital, adaptations of early modern literature).

My current research focuses on Aphra Behn and the music of the early Baroque period, methods of digital literary analysis and a brief biography of Aphra Behn as a denizen of Grub Street.  I am a founding editor and continuing editor-in-chief for the online open-access journal .

I have directed nine dissertations to completion.  My students have written dissertations mostly, but not exclusively, on eighteenth-century subjects including ecocritical readings of women鈥檚 poetry, Behn鈥檚 The Rover in contemporary productions directed by women, food and women鈥檚 travel writing, the animal-human continuum, animal speech in eighteenth-century literature, and animals in Florida literature.  I have served on over thirty PhD committees and twenty-five masters degree committees.

Many of my publications are available on USF Digital Commons, search Digital Commons@ 最新天美传媒, or Academia.Edu  or Research Gate .

OTHER RECENT AND NOTABLE PUBLICATIONS

  • , co-edited with Jessica L. Cook, University of Delaware Press, 2019
  • 鈥淎usten and Computation 2.0,鈥� Texas Studies in Literature and Language, special issue: What鈥檚 Next for Jane Austen, ed. Janine Barchas and Devoney Looser, December 2019: 397-415.
  • 鈥淐onstructing Place in Oroonoko.鈥� Gender and Space in Britain, 1660-1820. Ed. Karen Gevirtz and Mona Narain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 19-32. Winner of the 2015 Percy G. Adams prize from the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies.
  • 鈥淭racing a Genealogy of Oroonoko鈥� Essays and Studies, special volume 鈥淏ritish Literature and Print Culture,鈥� ed. Sandro Jung, for the English Association, vol. 66 (2013): 5-32
  •  Cambridge UP, Dec. 1997. Released in paperback (ISBN 13 978 0 521 02145 6) October 2005.