Anca Parvulescu's research and teaching interests include twentieth-century literature, modernity and modernism, literary and critical theory, narrative and the novel, and gender and feminist studies. Her current book project tells the story of a modern prohibition on laughter. The book shows how literary and philosophical texts, in dialogue with conduct books and visual culture, produce a normative aesthetics of the smiling face as an alternative to the contorted face in laughter. The book is an attempt to extricate laughter from theories of the comic, humor, jokes, the grotesque etc, and redirect our attention to the burst of laughter itself. What kind of subjects are we when we laugh? Other research and teaching interests are sound and listening, faciality and the history of the face, theories of affect, 1989 and Eastern Europe, and the history of the university. Anca’s teaching is split between the English Department and The Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities. She offers a range of interdisciplinary courses that bring literary, visual and theoretical texts into critical dialogue. Her work is published in journals like New Literary History, Diacritics, Camera Obscura, and Discourse. She is a recipient of a number of fellowships, including a Huntington Library fellowship for 2008-2009.