Leah Orr
Joseph P. Montiel/BORSF Professor and Department Head
Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 2013
M.A., Pennsylvania State University, 2009
Office: Griffin 228
Phone: 337-482-5462
E-mail: Leah.Orr@louisiana.edu
Pronouns: she/her
Teaching and Research Areas
Eighteenth-century British Literature; Fiction; Book History
Noteworthy
Leah Orr's research interests include literature, fiction, book history, and women writers in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her first book, Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2017. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older texts, Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought, and that publishers shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.
Her most recent book, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. In this book, Orr examines the construction of women authors in print in an era before the woman writer was a established category. By surveying several hundred works and grounding her analysis in specific case studies, Orr argues that women writers were represented in a variety of ways as publishers sought successful models for a new kind of writer in print. Publishing the Woman Writer also demonstrates a way to study early women writers and others who have left little trace in traditional archives by drawing on their printed books, paratexts, and textual reception.
Orr is currently at work on several projects related to the late seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn as well as projects about copyright and the material uses of eighteenth-century books. In addition to serving as the English Department Head, she is currently the Vice President of the Faculty Senate.
Book Covers:
