Laurie Garrison is a researcher and writer with expertise in nineteenth-century literature. She is currently writing a novel about William Morris in Iceland.
I spent the better part of fifteen years in the ivory towers of academia. Now I am focusing on exploring the natural world as portrayed by writers like William Morris and Mary Shelley.
As an academic, Laurie’s publications were reviewed in the TLS and her monograph was short-listed for the international ESSE prize. More recently, her Women Writers Chat was written up in The Guardian and her talk on forgotten Victorian women writers sold out at the Ilkley Literature Festival.
Dangerous Women
Laurie’s forthcoming chapter in Dangerous Women is a piece of popular history about female sexuality of the Victorian period. Fellow contributors to this challenging volume include Nicola Sturgeon, Irenosen Okojie and Claire Askew. You can support this crowdfunded project at Unbound.
Some Other Things You Might Find Interesting
Laurie was born in New Jersey but she has lived in the UK for nearly twenty years, having arrived to do a PhD in Victorian literature at the University of London.
Laurie has a collection of degrees in addition to the PhD: BAs in English and French Cultural Studies, an MA in English and an MSc in Human Computer Interaction.
As a PhD student, she had a part-time job at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She was cataloging the scientific library of the Victorian Royal Astronomer, George Biddell Airy. Her office had a view of the prime meridian.
Laurie was a postdoctoral research assistant on a project cataloging the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays of the Victorian period. She was based in the British Library staff office and she will one day write a novel about the experience. It will initiate a new genre called Bureaucratic-Imperial Gothic.
As a university lecturer (professor in the US) she taught literature to over a thousand students at Rutgers, Middlesex, Birkbeck, Hertfordshire, Westminster and Lincoln. She left this career regardless of having a permanent job, PhD students and a growing research program.
After leaving academia, Laurie learned to surf and she has now been surfing the Yorkshire coast for more than ten years.
In 2016, Laurie started and ran a business called Women Writers School, which offered online marketing courses for creative writers. The business’s main marketing activity was Women Writers Chat on Twitter. This chat continues to run and the business is now a volunteer organization called Women Writers Network.