
Lauren Cardon
Associate Professor
- (205) 348-8494
- lauren.s.cardon@ua.edu
- English Building 126
- Website
Education
- PhD, English, Tulane University
Research Areas
- Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature
- Composition and Rhetoric
Bio
Lauren Cardon is an Associate Professor of English on the clinical track, specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature as well as composition. Professor Cardon earned her PhD and Masters degrees from Tulane University. Her second book, Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in American Literature, argues that that canonical U.S. authors symbolically use clothing, as well as an evolving fashion industry, to tell their stories of self-fashioning. Authors Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, among others, map a shift from a class-conscious fashion industry governed by Parisian designers to a transatlantic industry of mass consumption governed by fashion journalism. Cardon’s first book, The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945-2008, was published by Palgrave MacMillan as part of the Signs of Race Series. She has also published articles in MELUS, Change, Southern Quarterly, and The Saul Bellow Journal.
Website: laurencardon.com
Current Digital Humanities Project: “Crimson Fried” food blog
Publications
Books
- Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature. University of Virginia Press, Forthcoming, 2016.
- The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945-2008. Palgrave, 2012.
Articles
- “From Black Nationalism to the Ethnic Revival: Meridian’s Lynne Rabinowitz.” MELUS
36.3 (Fall 2011): 159-185. - “‘Good Breeding’: Margaret Mitchell’s Multi-Ethnic South,” Southern Quarterly 44.4
(Summer 2007): 61-82. - “Herzog as Survival Literature,” Saul Bellow Journal 20.2 (Fall 2004): 85-108.