Laura Behling

Associate Provost of Faculty Affairs and Interdisciplinary Programs, Butler University

Laura Behling serves as the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Interdisciplinary Programs at Butler University.  In this role, she has primary responsibility for the University’s new general education program, faculty development, and interdisciplinary program development.  Prior to joining Butler, she was a faculty member in and chair of the English Department at Gustavus Adolphus College, where she also served for four years as the Director of the John S. Kendall Center for Engaged Learning, the college’s faculty development center.  Behling received her undergraduate degree in English from Kalamazoo College; a master’s degree in science and medical journalism from Boston University, and her PhD in English and American Literature from the Claremont Graduate School.  In 2003, Behling was named a Fulbright Scholar and taught at Palacky University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic.  In 2006, she participated in the Faculty Fellows program, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Institute for Experiential Learning, serving as an intern at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, Washington, D.C.  She also was selected for the NEH Summer Institute focused on “Literature, Medicine, and Culture” (2002).   She currently serves as a Consultant-Evaluator, Higher Learning Commission/North Central Association and previously was elected to the executive committee of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Teaching as a Profession and served as an MLA Delegate on Disability Issues in the Profession. Her scholarly works include two monographs: the first entitled The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 (Illinois UP 2001); and the second, Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature and Culture (Susquehanna UP 2008).  She’s also edited a Civil-War era composite memoir, entitled Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in 1863 (SUNY UP 2005/2006).  Most recently, the Council for Undergraduate Research published her edited collection of essays entitled Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010)–a volume that developed out of her own work with students on projects focused first, on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, and second, a museum exhibition of World War I United States propaganda posters.  Behling also has presented and published articles nationally and internationally on topics such as faculty development, undergraduate research/scholarship/creative work, administrative leadership, medical humanities, and American literature and culture.