Laura B. McGrath is writer, literary historian, and data scientist. She has written on books, publishing history, and data for The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.
Laura is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, she was the Associate Director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Michigan State University. Her academic writing has been published in New Literary History, American Literary History, Post45, CA: The Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020. She is the founding co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, and the “Culture Industries” section editor at Public Books. A former Kennedy Fellow with the Smithsonian Institute of American History, her work has been supported by the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, and the Big Ten.
Currently, Laura is at work on a book called Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature (under contract with Princeton University Press).
She consults with publishers and literary organizations on a private, individual basis.
She lives in Philadelphia.