Laura De Furio is currently the Acting Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. At UT, Laura is a member of the advisory committee for the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Laura De Furio specializes in seventeenth-century women writers and John Milton. Her book project, titled Femme Covert: Ciphered Politics in Early Modern Women's Writing, examines how British women practiced clandestine politics during the English Civil War and through the Restoration. To recover underground networks of politicking women, this project situates canonical authors, such as Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Hutchinson, in conversation with their understudied contemporaries, such as Frances Vane and Helen Hay Johnston, Lady Warriston. Including studies of more than forty under- and unexamined archival manuscripts, Femme Covert attends to a range of genres—including pastoral romance and biblical epic; gossip and ciphered letters; biography and petitions—to analyze the many strategies that women writers used to simultaneously disguise and promote controversial political critiques. Ultimately, Femme Covert argues that politicking women writers influenced public sentiment, shaped literary tradition, and innovated constitutional orders in seventeenth-century England.

Ph.D., English, Strode Program for Renaissance Studies, University of Alabama

M.A., English, Villanova University

B.A., Liberal Arts, Thomas Aquinas College

CV (June 2023): De Furio CV

Contact me by email at laura.defurio[at]gmail[dot]com

Find me on Twitter [at]lauradefurio