Laura Martin
Research Program Manager
Laura Martin began working with The Humanities Institute team in 2019 on the Deep Read Initiative, a community reading program that brings together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the community to think deeply about literature, art, and important issues of our time. The program, which is organized around one contemporary author and book each year, features books from a wide range of genres and explores their role in our politics, lives, and communities. Laura teaches the undergraduate Deep Read course at Porter College, manages the Deep Read program, and assists with other THI projects. She is a literary scholar, writer, and teacher, and she holds a PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the relationship between servitude, slavery, colonization, and race in the 17th-and 18th-century Anglo-American Atlantic, with a particular focus on the early novel. She is also a Lecturer at Porter College and in the Literature Department.
