Dr. Laura Kremmel

Dr. Laura Kremmel is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Niagara University. She comes to NU with over a decade of teaching experience and previously taught humanities, literature, and writing courses at Brandeis University, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and Lehigh University.

Dr. Kremmel primary teaches 18th- and 19th-century British literature courses. Her courses so far include 110: Literary Perspectives (Mad Science/Mad Scientist, and Sickness & Health), 202: Studies in British & Commonwealth Literature (The Frankenstein Network), 320: British Gothic Literature, 409: American Gothic Literature, and 410: History of the English Novel, among others.

Her teaching topics draw on a background in British Romanticism, Gothic and Horror Studies, Health Humanities, and History of Medicine. She leads students to enter the “world of the text” through historical context and media. Her pedagogy draws on experiences teaching writing and communication to create a decentralized classroom through student discussion, workshops, and hands-on projects. She also draws on training in a Literature and Social Justice department to help students use literature to access diverse perspectives and to rethink their understanding of the world and their places in it. She encourages students to rediscover enjoyment in reading and is invested in the eighteenth-century notion that reading for pleasure can be a revolutionary act.

Dr. Kremmel’s research is focused on creating conversations between Gothic Studies and the Health Humanities across a range of time periods, with particular focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. Her recent publications and projects have expanded to include the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as COVID-19 introduced renewed interests and anxieties in public health and medicine. Her approach is interdisciplinary and also includes Disability Studies, Death Studies, Horror Film, and Ecocriticism, with a leaning towards New Historicism.

Publications include:

Books:

• Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (University of Wales Press, 2022), which was a runner-up for the British Society for Romantic Studies First Book Prize and a Finalist for the International Gothic Association Andrew Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for Best Monograph
• The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, Co-edited with Kevin Corstorphine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

• “Gothic Disability.” The Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English: 1700-1900. Ed. Essaka Joshua. Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2025.
• “Sacred Consumption: An Ecocritical Reading of Gothic Cannibalism.” Religious Horror and the Ecogothic. Ed. Kathleen Hudson and Mary Going. Lexington Books, 2024.
• “Medical Gothic: Organ Harvesting and the Red Market.” The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. Ed. Rebecca Duncan and Justin Edwards. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
• “Medical Humanities and the Gothic.” Twentieth-Century Gothic. Eds. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Bernice Murphy. Edinburgh University Press, 2022
• “Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-Burial.” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene. Eds. Justin Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund. Minnesota University Press, 2022
• “Blind Survival: Disability and Horror in Bird Box.” Studies in Gothic Fiction. vol. 6. no.1, 2018, pp. 42-52.
• “Suddenly Monstrous: Gothic Configurations of Disability and Justice in Joshua Pickersgill, Jr.’s The Three Brothers.” European Romantic Review. vol. 27. no. 5, 2016, pp.639-658.

Educational Background