Laura Otis is an American historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 of science, and Professor of English, at Emory University

Emory University

Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...

.

She graduated from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 with a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 1983, and from the University of California at San Francisco with an M.A. in Neuroscience in 1988, and from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 . with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991.

She is a guest scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Works

• Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. ISBN 9780803235618
• Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press, 2000, ISBN 9780801865275
• Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ISBN 9780472112135
• Translator: Vacation Stories: Five Science Fiction Tales, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. ISBN 9780252026553
• Editor: Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 9780199554652
• Müller's Lab, New York: Oxford University Press US, 2007, ISBN 9780195306972