BIO
Lauren Gantz arrived at UWSP in 2016. She specializes in American ethnic literatures, with additional interests in women’s and gender studies, refugee studies, postcolonial studies, and graphic novels. Her research focuses on the ways in which diasporic Caribbean writers appropriate, create, or interrogate archives in order to negotiate historical trauma and national identity. She has also researched and written on the scholarship of teaching and learning, particularly as it relates to the teaching of Hmong American literature and Native American oral tradition. View CV
Gantz is currently serving as the coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies minor and as co-president of the Stevens Point Academic Representation Council. She advises Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society, and serves on the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity Policy Committee for Common Council. In the summers, she teaches for the college-prep program Upward Bound.
PUBLICATIONS
“Reading Refugitude: Critical Frameworks for Teaching Hmong American Literature.” Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom, Eds. Cristina Stanciu and Gary Totten, U of Illinois Press, 2024, pp. 68-88.
“Archiving the Door of No Return in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 123-147. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.13.2.07
“‘Nothing ever ends’: Archives of Written and Graphic Testimony in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 123-153. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2015.0031
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
- Universities of Wisconsin Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium
- Midwest Modern Language Association
- Modern Language Association
- Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
QUOTE
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is–it’s to imagine what is possible.” – bell hooks