(Ph.D., Indiana University, 1988), Associate Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, works in nineteenth-century poetry and feminist criticism. The author of "Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity" (PMLA1994; rpt 1995, 1999), Lootens is currently completing a book-length study of national sentimentality, Second Wave feminist criticism, and the "poetess tradition." In 1996, she 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. More recent writing has focused on Victorian patriotic poetry (in the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, 2000) and on transatlantic connections among female political poets (in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian, 1999). Her essay on Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in Romanticism and Women Poets (1999), won the Keats-Shelley Association of America Award. Although much of Lootens' work links the study of Victorian poetry to Romantic Period Studies or nineteenth-century American Studies, she has also published on Victorian appropriations of Shakespeare, as well as on gothic modes of social criticism.
