Professor Laurence Behrens has focused for more than 35 years on interdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of undergraduate writing. His Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, co-authored with Leonard J. Rosen, originally published in 1982 and now in its thirteenth edition, was the first widely-used cross-curricular textbook in freshman composition.

Dr. Behrens earned an A.B. in Theatre Arts from Brandeis University, an M.F.A. in Film, Radio, and Television from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in literature from UCLA. He has taught at UCLA, The American University in Washington, D.C., the University of California at Irvine, and most recently, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was one of the original members of the interdisciplinary Writing Program at UCSB, where he originated the lower division course in writing about classical music. He has also taught lower-division courses in writing about psychology and sociology. At the upper division level, he has taught legal writing, business writing, and writing about film studies and history, as well as graduate seminars in writing for teaching assistants.

His articles have appeared in Freshman English News, College English, College Composition and Communication, The English Journal, The Maryland Composition Review, Notes and Queries, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Journal of the University Film Association. In addition to Sequence for Academic Writing and Writing Across the Curriculum, Dr. Behrens’ other books with Leonard J. Rosen include Reading for College Writers, Theme and Variations: The Impact of Great Ideas, Writing Papers in College, and The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. He has also authored the historically-oriented The American Experience: A Writer’s Sourcebook and the legal casebook for undergraduate writers, Making the Case: An Argument Reader.