Professor of English
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
(212) 854-2114

lgordis@barnard.edu
Mailbox: Barnard 417

Office hours Mondays 2:15 to 3:15 and by appointment
To sign up for office hours, click here.

• English BC3179x:  American Literature to 1800
• English BC 3997:  Reading and Writing Women in Colonial America

• English BC3180y:  American Literature, 1800-1870
• FYSB BC 1181: The American Supernatural
  

• American Studies 3002y:  Approaches to American Culture, 1607-1865 (Spring 1999)
• English BC3997x:  Nineteenth-century American Women Writers  (Fall 2003)
• English BC3193x:  Literary Criticism and Theory

Useful resources:

·       useful links in American literature and culture

·       Columbia Library reference tools

o   Addall.com (new books / used books)

o   Books in Print

o   CLIO

o   Early American Newspapers

o   Early English Books Online

o   Eighteenth Century Collections Online

o   Evans Digital Edition

o   JSTOR

o   MLA Bibliography

o   Oxford English Dictionary

o   Project Muse

o   http://booksforchildren.pbworks.com

o   http://professorgordis.pbworks.com

·       Local resources:

o   Barnard College English Department

o   Barnard College

o   Courseworks

o   BEATL

Selected publications:

• "'None Need Think Their Sympathy Wasted': Reading Early American Books.” Common-Place 9.3 (April 2009).
  
  

• "'Bring Forth the Old Because of the New': Early Americanists and Contemporary Culture," Early American Literature 41.2 (2006): 369-375. (Response to the American Antiquarian Society's 2005 conference on "Histories of Manuscript, Print, and Performance in America.")

• "The Conversion Narrative in Early America," in A Companion to The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. (Malden, Massachusetts and London, England: Blackwell, 2005) 369-386.

• "Spirit and Substance: John Woolman and 'the Language of the Holy One,'" in The Tendering Presence: Essays on John Woolman, edited by Mike Heller. (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill P,  2003).

• Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003).

• "Consecrating a Rebellion: Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Friedrich Strauss, and the Historical Jesus," Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 24 (1997): 1-16.

• "The Experience of Covenant Theology in George Herbert's The Temple," The Journal of Religion 76.3 (July 1996): 383-401.

Current project:

"The word in it self": Transparency and Substance in Early Quaker Language  (book manuscript) explores the paradoxical complexities generated by early Quaker theories of simplicity in language, drawing on seventeenth-century English and eighteenth-century American Quaker writings, and considering their impact on the political activity of eighteenth-century Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly and on the broader American literary tradition, especially in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
 

Humpback whales lunge-feeding off the coast of Maine.   August 1996.