
Lauren S. Cardon
Associate Professor
of English,
University of Alabama


American Literature Scholarship
Fashioning Character: Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature
University of Virginia Press, 2021
Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the 20th century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible. Fashion became a tool for social mobility. During the late twentieth century, the fashion industry offered something even more valuable to its consumers: the opportunity to explore and perform.

DEI Teaching Strategies
Check out Teaching Interventions, my website and blog collaboration with Cassander L. Smith.

Attitudes about race, impacted by our current political environment, have produced pedagogical challenges for professors in the humanities who teach subjects that involve discussions of racial difference. Through the Teaching Interventions website, Dr. Smith and I aim to help teacher-scholars discuss race and other charged topics in the college classroom.