Laura Ciolkowski is Associate Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and is on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). She has taught in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program at Yale University, and the English Department at Wesleyan University, Barnard College and NYU, where she is currently on the faculty of the interdisciplinary Gallatin School for Individualized Study. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory and cultural studies, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, and travel literature. Courses include: "Writing and Politics"; "Genealogies of Feminism and Feminist Activism"; "Bodily Fictions and Feminist Theory"; "Gender and Technology"; "Travel Literature and Theory"; "Imperial Fantasies: The Literature of English Empire"; "Reinventing Literary History: Legacies of the Mediterranean"; and "From Streetwalking to Housekeeping: Women and Work in America." Her work has been published in a range of journals, including: Twentieth Century Literature; Studies in the Novel; Genders; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; and Victorian Literature and Culture. She has recently written the introduction to a new edition of Charles Dickens' American Notes for General Circulation and has edited a collection of the Christmas stories of Louisa May Alcott.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laura is a writer and book critic whose articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker Magazine, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle.