Laura Otis began her career as a scientist, earning her B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale in 1983 and her M.A. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco in 1988. Before receiving her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 1991, she worked in labs for eight years. Since 1986, she has been studying and teaching about the ways that scientific and literary thinking coincide and foster each other’s growth. Otis works with English, Spanish, German, French, and North and South American literature, especially nineteenth-century novels. She is particularly interested in memory, identity formation, and communication technologies and has been a frequent guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In addition to her academic books, Otis has written four novels. In 2000, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship for creativity.

Selected Publications:

• Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
  

• Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
  

• Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

• Translator: Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Vacation Stories: Five Science Fiction Tales, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

• Editor: Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

• Müller's Lab, New York: Oxford University Press, March 2007.