Rate My Professor Lora Geriguis

Lora Geriguis, Ph.D., serves as Professor of English in the Literature faculty and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at La Sierra University, where she joined the faculty in 2007. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Riverside in 1997, with fields in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Colonialism and Post-Coloniality, and Daniel Defoe; her dissertation was titled "Bows Without Arrows: The Role of ‘Native Agency’ in the Travel Narratives of Daniel Defoe and Other English Texts, 1668-1790." She holds an M.A. in English Literature (1993) and a B.A. in English cum laude (1991) from the same university, with a minor in Classical Studies. Geriguis has advanced through key administrative roles, including English Department Chair and Associate Dean, mentoring in the Honors Program, guiding senior capstone projects, and leading interdisciplinary colloquia on topics like artificial intelligence.

Her research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, ecocriticism, Daniel Defoe and contemporaries, the rise of the novel, working-class poets, and biblical literature. She examines environmental consciousness in texts from 1653-1734 for her book project "'Wit From Nature's Store: Reading Texts for/of Environmental Consciousness, 1653-1734.'" Select publications include "Stormy Weather and the Gentle Isle: Apprehending the Environments of Three Robinsonades" (Rewriting Crusoe, Bucknell University Press, 2020); “The ‘it’ and the ‘Joy that Kills’: An Ecocritical Reading of Kate Chopin's ‘The Story of an Hour’” (The Explicator, 2019); “Fellows Among the Bookshelves: The Royal Society’s Book-Gifting Network of the 1660s” (Pacific Coast Philology, 2017); "Transplanting the Duchess: Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Chronic Dilemmas’ of Literary Anthology Construction" (English Studies, 2017); and "In the Immensity of Nature Lost: Vision, Nature, and the Metaphysical in the Landscape of Richard Lewis' 'A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis'" (Early American Literature, 2016, with Sam McBride and Melissa Brotton). Awards include Service Learning Faculty Member of the Year (2018), Verla Rae Kwiram Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2017), and Godfrey T. Anderson Award for Excellence.