Lauren Cardon is an Associate Professor of English , specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. Professor Cardon earned her PhD and Masters degrees from Tulane University. Currently, she is working on an ecocritical monograph titled A Planet in Hospice: Environmental Justice in Existential Ecofiction. Professor Cardon also specializes in inclusive pedagogy and recently co-authored a fourth monograph, Inclusive College Classrooms: Teaching Methods for Diverse Learners, published by Routledge (December 2022).

Cardon’s earlier work speaks to her commitment to cultural studies understandings of identity construction in U.S. literature. Her third book, Fashioning Character: Style, Performance, and Identity (University of Virginia Press), shows how late twentieth century and contemporary American authors illustrate how American fashion, with its array of possibilities, has offered a vehicle for curating public personas. Characters explore a host of identities as fashion allows them to deepen their relationships with ethnic or cultural identity, to reject the social codes associated with economic privilege, or to forge connections with family and community. These temporary transformations, or performances, show that identity is a process constantly negotiated and questioned, never completely fixed.

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 South Atlantic Review, MELUS, Change, Southern Quarterly, and The Saul Bellow Journal.

Website: laurencardon.com

Books

• A Planet in Hospice: Environmental Justice in Existential Ecofiction (OSU Press, 2026, forthcoming)
• Inclusive College Classrooms: Teaching Methods for Diverse Learners (Routledge, 2022), co-authored by Anne-Marie Womack
• Fashioning Character: Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2021)
• Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2016)
• The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945–2008 (Palgrave, 2012)

Articles/Chapters

• “Beyond the Transition Story: Queering Transgender Literature.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Identity. Edited by Donald Wehrs. Routledge, 2024. Forthcoming.
• “Telling Their Own Stories.” Productive (and Disruptive) Partnerships: Faculty & Undergraduates Co-Authoring in English Studies. With coauthor Brandy Martinez. Eds. Laurie Grobman and Jane Greer. Utah State University Press. Forthcoming.
• “COVID and Accessibility.” Co-authors Brielle Campos, Danielle Gilman, and Jessie Wirkus. Southern Atlantic Review, Spring 2024.
• “Global Foodways: Digital Humanities and Experiential Learning.” Quick Hits: Teaching with Digital Humanities. Eds. Christopher Young and Emma Wilson. University of Indiana Press, 2020.
• “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.