Laura Doyle, Professor of English
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and has served as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Personnel in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. Since 2005, she has convened the Atlantic Studies Faculty Seminar for the Five Colleges Consortium of the Pioneer Valley.
Doyle's teaching and scholarship bring together transnational history, genre studies, postcolonial studies, and existential philosophy to consider the crosscultural dynamics shaping English–language literature. She teaches courses in theory, global studies, Atlantic race studies, history of the novel, and modernism, and she has mentored Ph.D. students in these and other areas, including postcolonial fiction and Black diaspora literature. Invigorated by the synergy of teaching and research, Doyle has been involved in the University's Center for Teaching. Since her year as a Lilly Teaching Fellow at the Center in 1999, she has offered workshops for graduate students on leading discussion, and in 2001 she facilitated a campus-wide Faculty Book Club on books related to teaching and the university.
Supported by an ACLS Fellowship, Doyle’s first book, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture(Oxford 1994), won the Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative for its study of the racial discourses countered and reconfigured in experimental fiction by Joyce, Toomer, Woolf, Ellison, and Morrison. Doyle’s other honors include a Rockefeller Fellowship for Intercultural Studies for research on Freedom’s Empire, the UMass CHFA Outstanding Teacher Award, and a second ACLS Fellowship for her current project, Untold Returns: The Global Dialectics of Literary History. In the Fall of 2010, she will be in residence at the University of Exeter, England as a Leverhulme Research Professor, giving Leverhulme lectures throughout Britain.
Her current project, Untold Returns, widens the framework for studying modernist and postcolonial narrative in English by attending to the cultural accretions of many centuries of interaction among Asian, Islamic, African, and Anglo-European empires. Recent essays related to this project include the Afterword to The Oxford Handbook to Global Modernisms and two online essays:
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“Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism.” Journal of Transnational American Studies. Inaugural issue, 1.1: http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/vol1/iss1/art7
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“Notes toward a Dialectical Method: Modernities, Modernisms, and the Crossings of Empire.” Literature Compass 6 (March 2010): 1-19.http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123306447/abstract
 Freedom's Empire |
 Bordering On The Body |
 Geomodernisms |
 Bodies of Resistance |