Laura Wright

Laura Wright is the founder of the field of Vegan Studies. She is Professor of English at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and animal studies. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Routledge, 2006 and 2009), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (U of Georgia P, 2010), which was one of the first monograph studies to investigate postcolonial ecocritical readings, Visual Difference: Postcolonial Studies and Intercultural Cinema (Peter Lang, 2011, co-authored with Elizabeth Heffelfinger), and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (U of Georgia P, 2015). Her edited collections include Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and other Works (MLA, 2014, lead editor with Elleke Boehmer and Jane Poyner), Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism (U of Nevada P, 2019), The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies (Routledge, 2021), The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2022, lead editor with Emelia Quinn), and Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (U of Georgia P, 2023, co-editor with Jessica Cory). She serves on the advisory boards for Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities and for the Critical Plant Studies Book Series at Lexington Books.