(Ph.D., Indiana University, 1988), is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English. The author of Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres, (Princeton, 2017), Lootens strongly supports current moves towards "undisciplining Victorian Studies." Transatlantic explorations of nineteenth-century poetry's racialized relations to larger cultural fantasies of patriotism, nationalism, femininity, and race, which have shaped her work since the publication of "Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity" (PMLA1994; rpt 1995, 1999), have more recently expanded to encompass transimperial studies. Her current work, for example, focuses on afterlives of early anti-slavery poetics in the work of Mark Twain, Toru Dutt, 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. Her other work 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 appropriations of Shakespeare as well as gothic modes of social criticism.
