Laura C. Otis Ph.D.

Laura Otis, Ph.D., is trained as a neuroscientist and literary scholar. She studies the ways that literature and science intersect. In her interdisciplinary research, she compares scientific and literary writers’ descriptions of memory, identity, emotion, and thought. Her current project, Cognitive Craft, examines how fiction writers choose words to help readers blend sensations and movements in their minds. Otis’s research has been supported by MacArthur, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Humboldt Fellowships, and she is a member-elect of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Otis earned her B.S. in Biochemistry at Yale University, her M.A. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco, her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Warren Wilson College. She is a Professor of English Emerita at Emory University. As a guest scholar, she has conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Germany.

Otis is the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), Networking (2001), Müller’s Lab (2007), Rethinking Thought (2016), and Banned Emotions (2019). She has translated neurobiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories (2001) into English and has edited Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2002). A fiction-writer as well as a scholar, she is the author of the novels Clean, Refiner’s Fire, Lacking in Substance, The Memory Hive, The Tantalus Letters, and the story collection D Minor.