Laura Christine Otis

Laura Otis is a writer, scholar, and emerita faculty member in English at Emory University. She is the author of the interdisciplinary books Banned Emotions, Rethinking Thought, Müller’s Lab, Networking, Membranes, and Organic Memory, and the novels and story collections Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Memory Hive, The Tantalus Letters, and D Minor. As a scholar, she studies the ways that scientific and literary thinking intersect and foster each other's growth. She works with British, Spanish, German, French and North and South American literature, especially 19th-century novels. She is especially interested in multimodal imagery and emotions and has recently worked as a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She has also translated Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories into English. Her research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships. Otis began her career as a scientist. She holds a BS in Biochemistry, an MA in Neuroscience, a PhD in Comparative Literature, and an MFA in Fiction. For more about her scholarly and creative work, see www.lauraotis.com