Lola Boorman

Profile

Biography

Lola is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture. She joined the department in 2019 as an Associate Lecturer and was appointed as Lecturer in 2021. She completed her Wolfson Foundation-funded PhD in 2020 at the University of York. Her doctoral project was also supported by a Fulbright scholarship to complete a research fellowship at Stanford University in 2018. She holds degrees from Cambridge University and Trinity College, Dublin. 

Lola’s research interests include 20th and 21st century US literature and film, literary institutions and infrastructures, intellectual history, the intersections between literature and linguistics, the short story form, the essay (both literary and filmic), and Black American film, literature, and intellectual history. Her work has appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story, Greater Atlanta: Black Satire After Obama (2024). Her first book Grammar and Twentieth-Century American Literature was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. She is the co-editor (with Julie Tanner) of Lydia Davis: Critical Essays (forthcoming EUP 2027).  

Research

Overview

Lola’s first monograph, Grammar and Twentieth-Century American Literature (2025), was published in Edinburgh University Press’s Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century series. The book explores how a range of US authors, including Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace, engage grammar as a means of negotiating literary authority and the relationship between literary production and systems and institutions of social power. The book explores a the range of institutional, philosophical, disciplinary and political definitions and connotations of grammar across the long twentieth century in order to understand how a range of writers and intellectuals (including Franz Boas, Barrett Wendell, William James, Noam Chomsky, Paul de Man and others) formulated grammar as a vital and necessary vehicle for questions of authority, democracy, race, gender, sexuality and class. 

Lola is co-edited (with Julie Tanner) of the first volume of critical essays on the short story writer and translator Lydia Davis. Lydia Davis: Critical Essays (EUP 2027) provides a comprehensive survey of existing scholarship on this popular but critically neglected author and brings together new work that explores Davis’s writing in novel and exciting literary-critical contexts such as disability studies, animal (and insect) studies, psychoanalysis, translation theory, and with insights from the Lydia Davis Papers at the Columbia Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. 

Lola has published on a range of topics in contemporary US literature, film, and TV, including on Lydia Davis and the ‘miniature’, David Foster Wallace and the philosophy of love, Benjamin Markovits and millenial meritocracy, the TV show Atlanta and linguistic satire, Percival Everett’s James and episodic form (via Mark Twain), and on the essay form and documentary film practices. 

Lola is currently working on a project exploring literary representations of the post service in 20th and 21st century US literature, focusing specifically on the post office as a site of tension between the national and the global, the individual and the state, public institution and private corporation, and various conflicting economic models and infrastructures. 

Supervision

Lola would welcome proposals for doctoral research on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, literary institutions, literary infrastructure, Black American literature and film, literary experimentalism (including literary linguistics), the essay (literary and filmic).

Teaching

Undergraduate

Postgraduate

Lola contributes to the core modules Film/Literature Encounters, Queer Studies Across Disciplines, and Reading Modernity. She teaches and convenes an MA Option module on post-civil rights African American literature and film entitled They’ve Gotta Have US: African American Literature from 1960 to Present. Since 2026/27 she has been the Director of Postgraduate Teaching and runs the core MA skills module, Postgraduate Life in Practice.

Lola is committed to teaching excellence and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.