As director of the Honors College, Dr. Laura Stevens works with Honors staff and students, alongside departments across the University, to develop a vision and mission for the future of Honors at Auburn. As an alumna of an honors program, she is passionate about the potential honors colleges have to offer as a center for intellectual community, educational enrichment, and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Stevens was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in the Philadelphia area. She has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and honors from Villanova University, and she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Michigan.
Before coming to Auburn and joining the Honors College in the summer of 2024, she was a professor of English and director of the Tulsa Undergraduate University Challenge at the University of Tulsa. Her scholarship focuses on early American, eighteenth-century British, and Native American literature. She is the author of The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Friday’s Tribe: Eighteenth-Century English Missionary Fantasies (Accepted for Publication, University of Pennsylvania Press), and Eighteenth-Century Guides to Reading the Bible (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press Elements Series). She remains an advisor and consultant to a research project she founded at the University of Tulsa in 2020, “The PSIG Project: Identifying and Honoring the Students of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, the Indigenous Boarding School that became the University of Tulsa” (Psigproject.org)