Athens, Ga. – Tricia Lootens, a University of Georgia associate professor of English and a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, will deliver the 18th annual Andrea Carson Coley Lecture on April 6 at 12:30 p.m. in the Georgia Museum of Art’s M. Smith Griffith Auditorium.
A reception honoring the Coley family will precede Lootens’ lecture on “Friends and Family: Coming Home” at 11:30 a.m. in the museum’s lobby. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
Lootens’ work at UGA focuses on 19th century poetry and feminist criticism. The author of “Hemans and Home: Romanticism, Victorianism, and the Domestication of National Identity,” Lootens is currently completing a book-length study of national sentimentality, second wave feminist criticism and the poetess tradition.
In 1996, Lootens published “Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization,” which was awarded the UGA Creative Research medal in 2000. Her more recent writing has focused on Victorian patriotic poetry (in “The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry”) and on transatlantic connections among female political poets (in “Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian”). Her essay on Letitia Elizabeth Landon in “Romanticism and Women Poets” won the Keats-Shelley Association of America Award.
Although much of Lootens’ work links the study of Victorian poetry to romantic period studies or 19th century American studies, she has also published on Victorian appropriations of Shakespeare as well as on gothic modes of social criticism.
The Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in Women’s Studies at UGA was endowed through a donation from Andrew and Kathy Coley in memory of their daughter, Andrea Carson Coley (1972-1993), who was a certificate candidate in women’s studies. Each spring, the lecture brings scholars conducting research in lesbian and gay studies to campus. This year’s lecture is sponsored by the UGA Institute for Women’s Studies and the Georgia Museum of Art.