Tricia Lootens

(Ph.D., Indiana University, 1988), is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita. The author of Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres, (Princeton, 2017), Lootens has devoted much of her career to Transatlantic explorations of nineteenth-century poetry's racialized relations to larger cultural fantasies of patriotism, nationalism, femininity, and feminism. Such explorations, which began shaping her work with the publication of "Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity" (PMLA1994; rpt 1995, 1999), have now expanded to encompass more clearly transimperial projects of "undisciplining" Victorian studies. Anong her current projects, for example, is a study of the afterlives of early anti-slavery poetics in the writing and reception of Toru Dutt, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. (Lootens is co-editor, with Paula M. Krebs, of the 2011 Longman Cultural Contexts edition of Rudyard Kipling's Kim.)

In 1996, Lootens published Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (University Press of Virginia), which was awarded the University of Georgia's Creative Research medal in 2000. Further criticism includes writing on Victorian patriotic poetry (in the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2000); on Felicia Hemans, Lydia Sigourney, and Frances E. W. Harper (in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian, 1999); and on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point."  Her essay on Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in Romanticism and Women Poets (1999), won the Keats-Shelley Association of America Award. Lootens has also published on Victorian feminist appropriations of Shakespeare as well as gothic modes of social criticism.