Devoney Looser, a Regents Professor of English and Global Sport Scholar at Arizona State University, will share archival, biographical, and critical findings on nineteenth-century British women novelists, with a focus on how and why one might recast original research as public-facing scholarship today. The talk will be given at KU's Spencer Research Library as part of the English Department's Holmes Summer Institute.

Looser's biography, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (2022), drew extensively on papers at KU’s Spencer Library and was the first full-length book devoted to the important historical novelists. Looser will share some of her methods and findings, while focusing on the benefits of working with argument and storytelling, and busting myths, in humanities scholarship.