Devoney Looser

Devoney Looser, professor of English at Arizona State University, 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 directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on Austen and her contemporaries (2012). A life member (and former member of the board of directors) of the Jane Austen Society of North America, Looser has played roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen since 2010. That academic oddity is featured in Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom (2013). It also prompted a theme song (award-winning poet Cornelius Eady’s “Stone Cold Jane”) and scored her a square on The New York Times’s Jane Austen board game.