The James Russell Wiggins Lecture with Christopher Looby

Christopher Looby is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His teaching and research focus on connections between literary texts and historical circumstances, relations between the material form of print publication and the effects of reading, and dynamic exchanges between bodies and pleasures across the longue durée of the history of sexuality. He is currently engaged in several projects, including a book on serial publication of narrative fiction in the long nineteenth century and its implications for writers and readers, and another book on the “literariness” of sexuality in the American nineteenth century. He is the general editor as well as the editor of several volumes in the Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century series (University of Pennsylvania Press), the most recent of which is an edition of the writings of Margaret J. M. Sweat, including her novel Ethel’s Love-Life (1859). Looby’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, and the Council on Research of the UCLA Faculty Senate. From 2010-2012 he served as the first President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He was elected to AAS membership in 2007.