Biography
Leila Mansouri is a fiction writer, essayist, and scholar of American literature. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. She has also written for The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Inquiry, and her short stories have been recognized by Best American Short Stories and anthologized in Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers.
She is currently at work on two projects: One, a book tentatively titled Sketching the Electorate: Race and the Aesthetics of Representativeness in the Early U.S., examines how intersections between literature and electoral politics shaped the ways that Americans came to understand representation as representative. The other is a collection of short stories about the overlooked fringes of the Irani diaspora in the U.S.
Academic History
- B.A. Northwestern University
- M.F.A. University of California, Irvine
- Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Academic Focus
Creative writing – fiction and nonfiction; American literature, beginnings through the nineteenth century; contemporary fiction; multi-ethnic American literature