Please note: Laurel has left the "Romance Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.
Laurel Iber is a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Studies (French) at Duke University. Her research focuses on the construction, representation, and conceptual articulation of gender, sex, and sexuality in nineteenth-century France, particularly within the spheres of literature, art history, and medicine. Her scholarly attention is devoted primarily to marginal figures such as the so-called "hermaphrodite," the "androgyne," and the "sexual invert," as they were known in nineteenth-century terms. Her dissertation is entitled "Troubles in Representation: (Con)figuring non-binary sex in nineteenth-century French literature, art, and medicine."
Laurel earned a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Art and French and a M.A. in Romance Studies (French) at Duke. She has been a doctoral exchange student at the École normale supérieure in Paris and the École normale supérieure in Lyon, and is finishing her dissertation as a visiting student at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot.
Laurel is completing a Certificate in College Teaching, and has taught courses in French language and culture at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as a self-designed interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar on gender in nineteenth-century Paris. She has also worked as an assistant on the Duke Neurohumanities in Paris summer program, and has served as a course development assistant in Romance Studies. She is currently assisting with the Arts and Cultural Citizenship initiative, a collaboration between Duke and word-class cultural institutions.
| Office Location: | 010 Languages Building |
| Email Address: | |
| BFA | University of Wisconsin, Madison | 2010 |
Laurel's research explores 19th and 20th C. French literature as it intersects visual art and cinema of the same period.