Faculty Profiles

Laurena Tsudama specializes in anglophone literature of the long nineteenth century, although her interests span the history of the novel more broadly. She has presented and published on topics ranging from British imperialism and the imagery of landscape improvement in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to the appropriation of “Dickensian realism” in the HBO series The Wire to the workings of "counterfeit aesthetics" in nineteenth-century art criticism. 

Laurena's dissertation, "Deceivers and Dupes: Relational Deception in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Fiction,” examines the strange relations constructed by lies and other forms of deception in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. The project responds to contemporary concerns regarding misinformation and falsification by relocating scrutiny from the present moment to an earlier one: the long nineteenth century. Seeing in the “age of doubt” a link to our current epistemic crisis, the project responds to this urgent problem by seeking to complicate our understanding of deception as more than the mere negation of truth. Through analysis of the lie as a relational act and an artistic practice, “Deceivers and Dupes” rethinks past and present accounts of lying as a linguistic, psychological, social, and aesthetic phenomenon while intervening in discourses surrounding the philosophy of truth and the psychology of belief to understand both the deceiver and the dupe as interpersonal and historical actors. 

Laurena holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and an M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut. In addition to Rutgers, she has taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Quincy College, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the University of Connecticut. Laurena has also worked in primary and secondary education in the past, including several summers teaching for pre-college programs designed to support underserved high-school and middle-school students.