Faculty & Affiliate Teaching Awards: Tricia Lootens

Institute for Women's Studies Affiliate Professor Tricia Lootens was recently named as a Josiah Meigs Teaching Professors at the University of Georgia's Faculty Recognition Banquet the evening of April 21. The professorship recognizes excellence in instruction at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Meigs Professors receive a permanent salary increase of $6,000 and a fund of $1,000 for departmental use. The professorship is named for Josiah Meigs, who in 1801 succeeded Abraham Baldwin as president - and sole professor - of Georgia’s fledgling state university.

Dr. Lootens is an Associate Professor in English and received her degree from Indiana University in 1988. She 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.

(original)