Holly A. Laird, Ph.D.

About

Holly A. Laird, Frances W. O’Hornett Professor of Literature, has research and teaching interests in Victorian, modernist, and contemporary literature and culture, with an emphasis on women’s writing and gender studies, as well as in contemporary theory and the history of literary criticism.

She is drawn to definitional boundary-breaking questions, most notably, (1) redefinition of the formalist notion of the lyric in the context of poets’ autobiographical and sequential methodologies, (2) reconsideration of the myth of the single author in relation to coauthorships, especially by women, and of collaboratively written novels, autobiographies, memoirs, and poetry, (3) critique of the “suicide identity,” as applied to prominent fin-de-siècle and modernist authors, and disclosure of their distinctively complex approaches to modern suicidology, (4) recovery of coauthored texts by Michael Field, two “married” women poets at the turn of the twentieth century, (5) retrieval of the comic dimension of modernism (previously viewed as bleak) and of its continuities with postmodernism, and (6) reconsideration of fundamental contributions by individual Victorian and modernist women writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Lucas Malet, and Edith Sitwell. (Thinking of this work as a vocation, she started puzzling over quirky phenomena like these at a young age.)

Awards and Honors

• Distinguished Editor Award, for work as editor-in-chief of “Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature” (Council of Editors of Learned Journals)
• Mark Spilka Lectureship (D. H. Lawrence Society of North America)
• Linda J. Lacey Award for Mentoring Excellence (Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Tulsa)
• The University of Tulsa Outstanding Teaching Award
• Outstanding Academic Book (American Library Association) for first book, “Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence”
• Whiting Fellow (Princeton University)
• Summa cum laude, Bryn Mawr College