Lauren Rule Maxwell is Director of The Citadel Distinguished Scholars Program and a Professor of English. Dr. Maxwell joined The Citadel faculty in 2008 and teaches classes in American and contemporary literature as well as writing courses such as Advanced Composition, Honors Advanced Writing, and Professional Communications. Because of her commitment to writing, she is involved with the Lowcountry Writing Project, which she directed between Fall 2017 and Spring 2022. She served as Associate Director of the DSP from Summer 2022 to Spring 2024.
In 2013, Dr. Maxwell received The Citadel Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Teaching, and Service. She served as the Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching English Program from 2012 to 2014, creating assessments to re-secure accreditation for the program, and in 2017 designed the Professional Communications curriculum that most students now take under The Citadel’s new General Education Program.
Dr. Maxwell’s monograph Romantic Revisions in Novels from the Americas was published in the Purdue University Press Comparative Cultural Studies series. She has authored articles in Modern Fiction Studies, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Margaret Atwood Studies, and the European Journal of American Studies. She has chapters in Cambridge University Press’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context and A History of Virginia Literature as well as in Teaching Hemingway and Modernism, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, and The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise.
From January 2021 until 2024, Dr. Maxwell has served as the President of the Margaret Atwood Society, an international organization of scholars, teachers, and students that promotes scholarly exchange about Atwood’s works. She is editing Approaches to Teaching the Works of Margaret Atwood for the MLA Press and writing a book on poetry about Civil War monuments.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, she graduated summa cum laude from Wake Forest University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Biology and received a National Science Foundation REU grant. After writing professionally for healthcare organizations in Washington, D.C., she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. During her graduate study, she received a fellowship for a Fulbright-funded exchange to the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados.