Lauren Coats

Lauren Coats is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU), within the College of Humanities & Social Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and specializes in early and nineteenth-century American literature, digital humanities, and archival studies. Her research integrates literary scholarship with digital methodologies, focusing on exploration narratives, environmental discourse, and geographic imagination.

Coats leads interdisciplinary projects such as editing Archive Journal, a publication on archives in higher education, and directing a digital initiative analyzing The Broadway Journal, a Poe-edited magazine. Her book project, Terra In/Cognita: Mapping the New United States, examines exploration narratives in the early republic. She also explores travel literature, cartography, and environmental themes, with notable work on Lewis & Clark and Charlotte Temple's cultural legacy.

Her academic contributions span collaborative digital humanities efforts and traditional scholarly writing, emphasizing innovative approaches to literary analysis. Coats' research bridges historical texts with modern digital tools, offering new frameworks for understanding American literary history and spatial narratives.