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

lgordis@barnard.edu
Mailbox: Barnard 417

Office hours Mondays 2:00-3:30 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

• FYSB BC 1181: The American Supernatural (Spring 2011)
• 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
• Addall.com (new books / used books)
• Books in Print
• CLIO
• Early American Newspapers
• Early English Books Online
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Evans Digital Edition
• JSTOR
• MLA Bibliography
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Project Muse
• http://booksforchildren.pbworks.com
• http://professorgordis.pbworks.com

Local resources:

• Barnard College English Department
• Barnard College
• Courseworks
• 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.