Laurence Mall came to the University of Illinois in 1994 after receiving her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Her research interests concern mostly Eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy, with an emphasis on the philosophes and on the novel. She is also interested in theories of everyday life, ethics and literature, history and memory in literature, writing the city, and gender issues. Her current research focuses on Louis Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris and Le Nouveau Paris --particularly on the representation of work and everyday life in these texts—and on writers around the period of the French Revolution.

Her book Origines et retraites dans La Nouvelle Héloïse (Peter Lang 1997) was followed by a book on Rousseau's Emile entitled Emile ou les figures de la fiction (Oxford: University of Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, SVEC 2002:04), which studies the forms, impact and meaning of fiction in what seems to be primarily a philosophical treatise. She co-edited with Brigitte Weltman-Aron an issue of L'Esprit Créateur on "Rousseau and Emotions / De l'émotion chez Rousseau." She has published about sixty book chapters and articles in French on authors and issues in various genres in such journals as CLIO, Dix-huitième siècle, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Littérature, Le Magazine littéraire, MLN, Poétique, Revue de littérature comparée, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

Her teaching interests include grammar, poetry, autobiography (all periods), contemporary France, and, for the eighteenth-century period, the novel, the relationships between fiction and philosophy, the history of ideas, and more.