Laura M. Stevens, Ph.D.

Laura Stevens joined Oklahoma State University as Dean of the Honors College in August of 2026, following two years as Director of Auburn University's Honors College and 25 years at the University of Tulsa.

An alumna of an honors program, she is passionate about the potential honors education offers for high-achieving students to find community and fuel their curiosity as they take advantage of extraordinary opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom. She looks forward to working with the talented, dedicated faculty and staff of the Honors College to elevate and expand the already exciting curriculum and programming that the college offers.

Dr. Stevens' teaching and scholarship are focused on British and American literature of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially texts of contact and colonialism, Indigenous literature, religious writings and emotion studies. She served as president of the Society of Early Americanists and the South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and she was editor of the academic journal Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature from 2005-2016.

She is the author of "The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility" (University of Pennsylvania Press), is co-editor of "The Place of Religion in the Enlightenment" (forthcoming from Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment), and has additional publications accepted by or under review at the University of Pennsylvania Press and Cambridge University Press. Her research has been supported by institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the American Philosophical Society. In 2019, she served as a Fullbright Professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Whittenberg in Halle, Germany. In 2020, she founded "The PSIG Project," a research parternship with Muscogee Creek Nation that leads University of Tulsa students in researching and writing biographies of students who attendeed the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, an Indigenous Residential School that became The University of Tulsa. (psigproject.org)