Devoney Looser, Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri, is the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 and Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850. She has edited Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism and serves as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. In the summer of 2012, she directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, "Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries." A life member (and former member of the board of directors) of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Looser has skated with the CoMo Derby Dames as Stone Cold Jane Austen since 2010, experiences that led to her starring in a low-budget roller derby vampire movie (Vampyras, in post-production) and to having an award-winning poet write her a theme song (Cornelius Eady's "Stone Cold Jane").
