Synopsis
Lauren Schachter received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019, with a dissertation that investigates eighteenth-century British writers' engagements with the notion of English as a language with an unpredictable yet consistent grammatical structure, despite its oft-lamented differences from Latin and ancient Greek. These authors and grammarians discovered a creative challenge—to the literary as well as the grammatical imagination—in investigating those parts of English speech that had most disrupted the Latin model. Schachter's published work includes an essay on the 'Romantic Preposition' for a special comparative literature issue of MLN, and five forthcoming entries for the Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660-1820. She teaches in the English Department and in the Humanities Core, where she shares with students her fascination for alternate history novels and the poetics of the counterfactual, and her expertise in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature topics, including nationalisms, apocalypse, and the politics of language and language philosophy from 1660-1900.