Dr. Laura Fisher

Biography

Laura Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature and literature culture, focusing on cities. Her research encompasses nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature and explores critical questions surrounding race, class, gender, and self-making in various urban modern contexts. Fisher's 2019 book, "Reading Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era," published by the University of Minnesota Press, investigates the literary history of social reform institutions in the United States. Currently, she is working on a new book, supported by an SSHRC Insight Development Grant, that examines the often-overlooked genre of sociological fiction within U.S. literary history, known by terms such as “economic novel,” “social novel,” or “research novel.” Her scholarly articles have appeared in notable journals including American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, MELUS, and Modern Language Quarterly. Beyond academia, she engages in cultural criticism covering topics such as riot grrrl, popular music culture, and contemporary literature, with work published in The Guardian and New Inquiry, among others. Additionally, she has produced a digital public humanities project entitled City Words, which serves as a pedagogical tool for teaching urban literatures.

Research Interests