Background

Christopher Looby was born in the United States.

Education

In 1979, Christopher Looby received a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and History from Washington University, and a Master of Arts in 1981.

In 1989, he received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Career

Christopher Looby is a Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States. He also was an educator at the University of Chicago and at the University of Pennsylvania. He co-directs the Americanist Research Colloquium at UCLA and directs the English in Florence: American Writers and Artists Abroad summer travel study program.

Looby has issued two nonfiction works, the juvenile literature biography Benjamin Franklin, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States, and The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He is currently engaged in several scholarly 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 specific volumes in the Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century series (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), for which he is preparing an edition of the writings of Margaret J. M. Sweat, including her novel Ethel’s Love-Life (1859) and selections of her poetry and critical prose.

He is also co-editing (with Professor Michael North) a collection of the writings of the late Sam See (UCLA PhD, 2009), entitled Queer Natures, Queer.

Achievements

• Christopher Looby is known as the author of several fiction and non-fiction works, as well as editor of highly acclaimed volumes, such as Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century series.
  
  Professor Looby’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Newberry Library (Chicago), as well as by the Council on Research of the UCLA Faculty Senate.
  
  

Works

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• book

  • American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions

    (Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent ...)

    2012
  • Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself

    (Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee is a scathingly hum...)

    2017
  • Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States

    (Voicing America uncovers the complex process of early Ame...)

    1996
  • Benjamin Franklin 1990
  • Cecil Dreeme 2016
  • The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1999
  • "The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman" and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories 2016

Views

Professor Looby’s teaching and research address themselves to 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 and the longue durée of the history of sexuality.

Membership

Christopher Looby served as the first President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists from 2010-2012.

Personality

Christopher Looby is a homosexual.

Connections

Christopher Looby lives in Hollywood with his husband Joe and their dogs Clover and Daisy.

husband:

Joe Looby