Biography
​
Lori Harrison-Kahan (A.B. Princeton, Ph.D. Columbia) is the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson, which received the 2021 Best Book Edition Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and co-editor of a new edition of Heirs of Yesterday by Emma Wolf. She is the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary, which received an honorable mention for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award. Her article “Miriam Michelson’s Yellow Journalism and the Multi-Ethnic West,” co-authored by Karen E. H. Skinazi, was awarded the Don D. Walker Prize for best essay in Western American literary studies. A recipient of the American Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for Independent Scholars and Contingent Faculty, Lori is Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College. From 2015-2020, she served as the Book Review Editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
%20(1)_JPG.jpg)
​
Lori is currently working on a book manuscript titled “West of the Ghetto: Pioneering Women Writers and Jewish American Literary Culture,” which tells the stories of now forgotten late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jewish women writers from the Western United States. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Modernist Studies Association. In 2016, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and a Robert E. Levinson Fellow at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Current editorial projects include Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History, co-edited by Annie Atura Bushnell and Ashley Walters, and The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, a Penguin Classics edition of Elizabeth Garver Jordan's writings co-edited by Jane Carr.
​
Lori’s essays and book reviews have been published in American Historical Review, American Jewish History, Callaloo, Cinema Journal, Jewish Social Studies, Journal of American History, Legacy, MELUS, Modern Drama, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Language Studies, Shofar, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Her work also appears in the anthologies Yearning to Breathe Free: Jews in Gilded Age America; Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond: American Alternative Comics, 1980-2000; Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature; Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion; Passing Interest: Racial Passing in U.S. Fiction, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990-2010; The Race and Media Reader; The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction; and The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism. She has contributed essays on teaching Jewish American and African American literature to the Modern Language Association’s volumes Options for Teaching Jewish American Literature and Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen. In 2012, she co-edited a special issue of MELUS on “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies” with Josh Lambert. She is on the editorial board of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and previously served on the editorial board of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
At Boston College, Lori teaches courses on American literature, American studies, and the craft of writing, including “Human Rights and American Women’s Writing, 1850-1920,” “Reading In/Justice: Literature as Activism from Abolition to #BlackLivesMatter,” “Creative Nonfiction," and “Hamilton and American Culture.”
​