Education

PhD English and American Literature, Stanford University
MSc (Oxon.) Comparative Education, University of Oxford
BA Hons. (First Class) English, University of Oxford
BA English, College of Saint Benedict

Biography

Laura McGrane is Director of Visual Culture Arts and Media (VCAM) and Chair, English at Haverford College. She served as Director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities (2011-14), overseeing the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, and she led the successful $15M campus VCAM renovation (2013-17) in collaboration with the college President.  She received her PhD from Stanford University and teaches eighteenth-century print culture and digital media, integrating theoretical work on interface and coding into scholarship on the history of the book.

As VCAM Director, she is co-PI for $1.5M in Mellon Grants focused on Visual Studies and Philadelphia Area Creative Collaborative programming. She also oversees the Haverford Innovation Program (HIP) and the VCAM MakerArts space.  She has led national Mellon (AALAC) workshops, including The Humanities Lab (2014) and The New Digital Archivalism (2009).  She is currently Director of the Trico Digital Humanities initiative launched with colleagues from Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore, serves on the editorial board of 18thConnect (http://www.18thConnect.org), and is on the advisory board of the Swarthmore College Aydelotte Foundation.

While a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, she conducted Masters research on issues of access at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She is currently the District IV (Pennsylvania, Rhode Island) Rhodes Secretary and is a regular workshop leader on issues of digital humanities in liberal arts education.

Research

Eighteenth-century British literature, with particular focus on the novel, drama, non-fictional prose, and visual culture; Transatlantic studies; South African literature; historiography, media studies and digital humanities; liberal arts education and technology