Laura Wilson

Laura Wilson received her BA in English from the University of Oxford and her MA in English Literary Studies from the University of Exeter. She undertook doctoral study at the University of Mississippi, where her dissertation explored the relationship between soil and Black modernity in early twentieth century literature of the US South. From 2020-2022 she was a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Studies at Fisk University in Nashville. Before starting as a Research Fellow at St Andrews, Laura worked at the British Library in London.

Laura has previously taught courses on Black modernity, and gender in the diaspora. 

Laura is currently preparing her first monograph entitled On Southern Soil: Transformations of Black Agriculture, 1880-1960. This project offers a critical and material reappraisal of Southern land by considering the complex relationship between agriculture and the pursuit of African American citizenship in the first half of the twentieth century. Through analysis of works by Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, this project explores how soil might function as a tool for Black social and political reenfranchisement via democratic agrarianism, land possession, and earthly stewardship. 

Laura's newest project, tentatively titled Redefining Narratives of the Plantation: From Kindred to the Edge of Here explores how contemporary Black authors from 1970 to today write back against dominant representations of slavery and the plantation through narratives set in the present day, as they interrogate this history via Afrofuturism, magical realism, and dystopian horror.