Catherine Bryson Chair: Ania Loomba

Dr. Ania Loomba, professor of English, has been appointed to the Catherine Bryson Professorship, SAS Dean Samuel H. Preston announced.

This semester Dr. Loomba came to Penn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a professor of English. In addition, she has held faculty appointments at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Tulsa. Her research focuses on Renaissance literature and history, which she examines through the lenses of gender studies and colonial and post-colonial studies. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Sussex and has been awarded fellowships by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois.

Her first book, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, has been widely excerpted in subsequent collections. Her 1998 release, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, was recently translated into Italian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese. Her latest book, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, has just been published by Oxford University Press. At present, Dr. Loomba is co-editing the Documentary Companion to the Study of Race in the Early Modern Period with Jonathan Burton and is working on a book manuscript: Of Queens and Spices: Renaissance Literature and Travel to the East Indies.

This endowed professorship was established in 1989 by Natalie I. Koether, Esq., CW ‘61, L '65, a long-standing University Charter Trustee, founding member of the Trustees' Council of Penn Women, and chair emerita of the SAS Board of Overseers. The chair honors her high school English teacher, Catherine Bryson, ED '22, G '47.