Karen Swallow Prior

Karen Swallow Prior is Associate Professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she specializes in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and teaches courses in Christian Literature and Christian Poetics. Prior was the recipient of Liberty University’s 2003 President’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2006 Sigma Tau Delta (Liberty University Chapter) Teacher of the Year Award.

Prior's scholarly publications include Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife: A Review of Criticism and a New Analysis (Edwin Mellen Press, 2003) and "Hannah More and the Didactic Tradition,” published in the journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (2003).

Prior earned both her Ph.D. and her M.A. in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo and received her B.A. in English at Daemen College in Buffalo, New York.