The Legacy of Jane Austen
Making, studying, and preserving Austen’s global legacy
Grasping the impact of an icon
The Legacy of Jane Austen initiative accelerates public-facing research on the novelist’s life and writings, with a particular focus on her impact on popular culture of the past, present, and future. Our programs make, study, preserve, and shape Austen’s global legacy through newly edited texts, illustrations, and adaptations, in projects designed and carried out by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate research teams. We aim to better understand Austen’s peculiar path to iconicity and to document the voices and concerns of her global readers today.
Meet the director
Devoney Looser is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her latest book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane (St. Martin's Press, 2025), is a USA Today Best-Selling Book and was featured on CBS Sunday Morning.
Looser—a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Public Scholar, and a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow—is the author or editor of twelve books on Jane Austen and literature by women, including the biography Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Porter in the Age of Austen (Bloomsbury, 2022). Other previous books include The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Looser’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, and the TLS. She's written on professional issues for The Chronicle of Higher Education and has been interviewed about Austen on CNN.