Laura Beard, PhD, MA, BA

Area of Study / Keywords

life narrative Literature of the Americas stories of change

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About

I am a professor of literature in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies as well as Associate Dean (Access, Community and Belonging) in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. I previously served as Associate Vice President (Research) in the Office of Vice President Research and Innovation and, before that, as Chair of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts. My research is in the fields of life narrative, Inter-American Studies, and Indigenous Studies. My books include Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Writing in the Americas (University of Virginia Press) and The Divided States: Unraveling National Identities in the Twenty-First Century (University of Wisconsin Press, with Ricia Chansky) and I have edited and co-edited issues on Indigenous life narratives, Latin American women writers, and other issues in life writing. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, I have received awards for my teaching and my research. 

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Research

My research interests include life narratives, Inter-American literature, Indigenous literatures and cultures and related topics. I serve on the steering committee for the International Autobiography Association Chapter of the Americas and am a consulting editor for the journal a/b Autobiography Studies. 

In my SSHRC research project on John S. McClintock's 1939 "Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers," I explore how McClintock's memoir serves as a guidebook to the history of the early days of Deadwood and the Black Hills while it encourages us to confront issues of truth, memory, storytelling, history, land, and Indigenous sovereignty critical to his times and to ours. 

Another research project takes me to the northern Highlands of Scotland, working with family and community archives, to look at Scottish samplers as stitched stories, tracing out the life stories of their makers, their families, and their communities. 

20190601 to 20220531

"Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood (SSHRC Insight Grant 2019-2022) examines the “persistent power of nostalgia” (Hirsch and Miller 5) and the affective will to know that drives so much genealogy research, life narrative, and cultural heritage tourism through the specific example of a life narrative from my own family tree, John S. McClintock’s Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers (1939; University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Research into McClintock’s memoir, its influence on the written and popular history of Deadwood and the Black Hills, and the traces of that history in present day cultural heritage tourism in Deadwood (specifically the Days of 76 events) allow me to explore how both individual acts of memory and collective acts of memory participate in the construction of national narratives on contested lands.

Laura J. Beard and Ricia Anne Chansky, co-editors

2023 January;

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Beard, Laura J.

Life Writing. 2021 October; 18 (4):485-496

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Beard, Laura J.

Life Writing. 2019 January; 16 (4):539-551

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Beard, Laura J.

Studies in American Indian Literature. 2018 September; 30 (3-4):151-178

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Laura J. Beard

Pedagogy. 2011 January; 11 (1):109-134

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Laura J. Beard

2009 January;

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Laura J. Beard

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