Devoney Looser

Devoney Looser is one of the most widely read Austen scholars writing today. Foundation Professor of English at Arizona State University, she is the author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane (2025), the New York Times Editors’ Choice Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters (2022), and The Making of Jane Austen (2017)—a study of how Austen’s afterlife in adaptation, illustration, and stage made her a household name.

Looser has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award, and her writing on Austen, women’s literary history, and the long eighteenth century has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Salon, and Entertainment Weekly. She is a popular lecturer at JASNA and other Austen societies, and—gloriously—she is also a member of the all-female roller derby league the Arizona Derby Dames, where she skates as Stone Cold Jane Austen.

For 2027, Looser anchors the convention’s Spotlight Author programming, framing Austen’s craft, controversies, and continuing influence on English-language fiction.