Lisa L Moore

Life and education

Lisa Moore was born in Calgary, Canada. Principal themes in Moore’s work include the centrality of love between women to literary genres such as the novel, the landscape arts, and the sonnet; the transatlantic and multi-racial history of feminist art and thinking; and the importance of poetry to second-wave feminist, womanist, and lesbian cultures and politics. She earned a B.A. in English with honors at Queen’s University in 1986, and then completed her doctorate at Cornell University in 1991. Moore joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, where she is currently a professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies. In 2002, Lisa Moore served as a visiting professor at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre). She has been an affiliated faculty member of both Comparative Literature Program as well as the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies throughout her time at UT Austin (1991–present). She served as Interim Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies from 2013-2014.

Work

Lisa Moore has published two single-authored books: Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minnesota, 2011), which was awarded Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies in 2011 and named a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award; and Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Duke, 1997). In 2015, Moore published a scholarly edition of The Collected Poems of Anna Seward (Routledge). She also co-edited two books: Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford, 2011) (with Joanna Brooks and Caroline Wigginton), which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award for 2012; and Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project (2010) (with Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, and Sharon Bridgforth), an anthology of creative writing and theory by women of color and allies. She has published articles in GLQ, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Cultural Critique, Feminist Studies, and Textual Practice, as well as more than 40 other book chapters, essays and reviews.

Lisa Moore’s poems have appeared in The Rusty Toque, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, White Wall Review, Anchor Magazine, Ostrich Review, Codex Journal, and the Lavender Review, as well as other venues. She has been named semi-finalist in the Gazing Grain Press Chapbook Contest (2015) and the The Feminist Wire Poetry Contest (2014, judged by Evie Shockley). In 2012, Moore won the Art/Lines Ekphrastic Poetry Prize for her poem, “Anthropomorphic Harp.” She has written several op-eds and interviews for news media publications such as The Dallas Morning News, Austin-American Statesman, The San Antonio Express-News, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Women’s Review of Books, and Ms Magazine Blog.

Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011)

Martha Vicinus offers a summary of Sister Arts in her review for the Women's Review of Books:

Moore makes a valuable contribution to the current debate about the place of friendship in same-sex relations. She advocates a both/and approach, insisting both that women had a separate culture and that they engaged directly with the dominant male culture. Some scholars of the eighteenth century have suggested that friendship was an elite, male option, best understood as a refuge from marriage and its tangled familial obligations. Moore, however, notes that elite women, like their male contemporaries, found friendship to be superior to marriage because it was disinterested and freely chosen; it inculcated a social, as opposed to private, virtue, leading to greater sympathy for those beyond the ties of kinship. Both sexes sought to justify alternative emotional bonds outside the family by drawing upon classical models, but subtly altering them to fit their own priorities.

Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (1997)

Jody Greene offers a summary of Dangerous Intimacies in her review for Nineteenth Century Literature:

The best thing bout Lisa Moore's [sic] book is not that it puts sex back into the history of "romantic friendships" between women; nor that it explodes themyth that there were no "lesbians" before the end of the nineteenth century; nor, finally, that is gives "Sapphic history" a prominent place in both the institutional history of the novel and the ideological genealogy of modernity. Dangerous Intimacies, certainly, aspires to and largely achieves all of these hefty ambitions. Yet its most salutory contribution to literary studies and lesbian historiography may well lie elsewhere, in its timely reminder that representations of lesbian desire, despite their much-remarked "disruptive aspects" (p.8), can be appropriated to serve cultural goals that are anything but revolutionary."

The Collected Poems of Anna Seward (2015)

From the publisher’s website:

Seward’s reputation was so high that Sir Walter Scott edited the posthumous edition of her poems in 1810. Unlike Scott's, [Lisa Moore’s] edition [of Seward’s collected poems] reproduces the poems as they were first published in periodicals and collections during Seward's lifetime, allowing scholars to experience them as eighteenth century readers did. It also includes more than 200 poems that were excluded from the Scott edition.

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions with Joanna Brooks and Caroline Wigginton (2011)

From Sarah Prescott in The Times Literary Review:

As a more historically nuanced version of the term globalization, transatlanticism lends itself to a focus of "transnational and intercultural networks of literary and cultural movement around the Atlantic world"...This original and innovative anthology will transform the ways in which scholars understand and locate female experience in this period of history of the Atlantic world and feminist literary historians interested in the archipelagic character of British women's writings would add to this picture.

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, and Sharon Bridgforth (2010)

From publisher’s website:

“In Austin, Texas, in 2002, a group of artists, activists, and academics led by performance studies scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones formed the Austin Project (tAP), which meets annually in order to provide a space for women of color and their allies to build relationships based on trust, creativity, and commitment to social justice by working together to write and perform work in the jazz aesthetic. Inspired by this experience, [Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic] is both an anthology of new writing and a sourcebook for those who would like to use creative writing and performance to energize their artistic, scholarly, and activist practices.”

Selected publications

• "Virtual Delville as Archival Research: Rendering Women’s Garden History Visible." Visualizing the Archive. Spec. issue of Poetess Archive Journal  2.1 (2010)

• “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships.”  Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.1 (2005): 49-70.

• “Lesbian Migrations: Mary Renault’s South Africa.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.1 (November 2003): 23-46.

• “Acts of Union: Sexuality and Nationalism, Romance and Realism in the Irish National Tale.” Cultural Critique 44 (Winter 2000): 113-144.

• “'Something More Tender Still Than Friendship': Romantic Friendship in Early Nineteenth Century England.”  Feminist Studies 18.3 (Fall 1992): 499-520.  Rpt. in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

• “'She was too fond of her mistaken bargain': The Scandalous Relations of Gender and Sexuality in Feminist Theory.”  Diacritics 21/22 (Summer-Fall 1991): 89-101.

• “Sexual Agency in Manet's Olympia.”  Textual Practice 3.2 (June 1989): 222-233.

• Rev. of Mrs. Delany and her Circle, by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds. The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats (Autumn 2011).

• “Eileen Myles’ Poet’s Novel.” Rev. of Inferno (a Poet’s Novel), by Eileen Myles. Women’s Review of Books 28 (September/October 2011).

• “Self-Awareness, Blind Spot, or Just LOL.” Rev. of The Professor and Other Writings, by Terry Castle. Women’s Review of Books 27.5 (September/October 2010): 9-11.

• “Mary Delany and her Circle, in the Museum and on the Page.” Rev. of Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, eds. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and the exhibition Mrs. Delany and Her Circle. Curated by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, New Haven: Yale Center for British Art. Eighteenth-Century Studies 44.1 (Fall 2010): 99-104.

• Rev. of Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928, by Martha Vicinus. Lambda Book Report 13 (Jan-Feb-March 2005): 51-52.

• Rev. of Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment, by Elizabeth Susan Wahl. Modern Philology 100.1 (August 2002): 105-108.

• “Immoral, Unhealthy and Pernicious.” Rev. of Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties, by Gay Wachman. Women’s Review of Books 19.5 (February 2002): 24-25.

• Rev. of Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, by George E. Haggerty. Modern Philology 99.1 (August 2001): 121-124.

• Rev. of Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, by Andrew Elfenbein. Albion: A Quartely Journal Concerned with British Studies 32.4 (Winter 2000): 662-663.

• “Guilty Pleasures.” Rev. of Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress, by Nina Auerbach. Women’s Review of Books 18.1 (October 2000): 13.

• “English Literature -- Eighteenth-Century.” Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Bonnie Zimmerman. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000, 261-262.

• “Irony in Tuscany.” Rev. of Italian Fever, by Valerie Martin. Women’s Review of Books 16.10/11 (July 1999): 42.

• Rev. of Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss, by Carolyn Allen; Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories, by Julie Abraham; and Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, by Marilyn R. Farwell. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 24.1 (Autumn 1998): 254-257.

• “Extending Families.” Rev. of The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships Among Women, by Susan Kreiger; and Lesbian Friendship: For Ourselves and Each Other, eds. Jacqueline S. Weinstock and Esther D. Rothblum. Women’s Review of Books 14.12 (September 1997): 14-15.

• “The same and different.” Rev. of Spinsters and Lesbians, by Trisha Franzen; and Render Me, Gender Me, by Kath Weston. Women's Review of Books 14.3 (December 1996): 10-11.

• Rev. of The Apparitional Lesbian, by Terry Castle; and Masquerade and Gender, by C. Croft-Fairchild. South Central Review 12.2 (Summer 1995): 73-74.

• “Literature, Politics and Political Criticism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36.3 (Fall 1994): 353-356.

• "Rev. of Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories." ed. Diana Fuss. Journal of the History of Sexuality. 4.2 (October 1993): 324-327.

• “Dorothy Allison.” Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States. Eds. Sandra Pollock and Denise Knight. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993. 13-18.

• Rev. of The Female Autograph, by Domna C. Stanton; and Masques of Morality: Females in Fiction, by Johan Lyall Aitken. Queen's Quarterly 96.1 (Spring 1989): 170-172.

• Rev. of Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Canadian Woman Studies 9.3/4 (Fall-Winter 1988): 146-147.

Book chapters

• “Safe Space, Storage Sheds, and Outdoor Plumbing: Lesbian Garden History.” Queering the Interior. Ed. Matt Cook and Andrew Gorman-Murray. London: Bloomsbury Books, 2016.

• “Women’s Land as Garden History: Art, Activism, and Lesbian Spaces.” Disciples of Flora: Gardens in History and Culture. Eds. Victoria Pagan, Judith Wallack Page, and Brigitte Weltman-Aron. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015, pp 20–31.

• “The Swan of Litchfield: Sarah Pierce and the Lesbian Landscape Poem.” Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. Ed. Thomas A. Foster. New York: NYU Press, 2007. 253-276.

• "Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeannette Winterson.” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. London: Routledge, 1995. 104-127.

Creative writing and journalism

• “In The Middle,” “Hello Calgary,” “Dragonfly or Hummingbird.” Poems. The Rusty Toque.

• “Moan and Low.” Poem. Tinderbox Poetry Journal vol. 2 Issue 1, June 2015.

• “Weary and Sore.” Poem. Lament for the Dead, June 20, 2015.

• “Epithalamion,” “Football,” “Highwood River Swimming Hole,” “Branding Time, 1979.” White Wall Review 2015.

• “Let’s buck tradition by putting a woman on the $20 bill.” Op Ed. Dallas Morning News, April 28, 2015. Reprinted in Alcalde.

• “Raising White Men,” “Home Safety,” “I Think You Know,” “Narrow Rooms,” “Nephews.” Poems. Halvard Johnson’s Truck, April 5, 2015.

• “Gay Marriage and Texas Trailblazers.” Op Ed. The Dallas Morning News LGBTQ Blog, March 27, 2015.

• “El Refugio, Texas.” Poem. Anchor Magazine, Issue 3, Spring 2015.

• “Subverting the Girlie Calendar: February.” Column. Ms. Magazine Blog, Feb. 1, 2015.

• “Cold Garden.” Poem. Ostrich Review 6.2. Featured in The Literary Jane’s Walk, Calgary, Alberta, May 5, 2015.

• (With Paige Schilt). “Embrace Family Diversity Sooner.” Op-Ed. Austin American-Statesman, Dec. 27, 2014, p. A16.

• “Raising White Men.” Poem. Blog This Rock, Dec.. 10 2014.

• “The Dangers of Mansplaining Abortion.” Ms. Magazine Blog, October 27, 2014.

• “Homophobia is Not a Thing of the Past.” Op Ed. Pacific Standard: The Science of Society, October 20, 2014.

• “A welcome mix of football and feminism at UT.” Op-Ed. The San Antonio Express-News, October 3, 2014.

• “An Almost Unheard Low Note: An Interview with Minnie Bruce Pratt.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 August 2014.

• “On Judy Grahn’s `Mental.”” Essay. Short Takes on Long Poems volume 5, at Length Magazine, 7 April 2014.

• “Epithalamion.” Poem. Codex Journal, December 24, 2013.

• “It Is An Apple: An Interview With Judy Grahn.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 August 2013.

• “Cowgirl Filibuster: Couplets for Heroic Texas Women.” Poem. Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week, July 5, 2013. Reprinted on Alice Walker, The Official Website, 9 Poetic Fingers, and Split This Rock Poetry Database.

• “The Dream of a Common Bookstore.” Essay. Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 April 2013. Cited in Shelf Awareness.

• “Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others.” Essay. Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 February 2013. Cited in Harriet, the Blog (National Poetry Foundation), Poets.org, Feministing (three mentions).

• “Anthropomorphic Harp.” Poem. ISSUE, the Arts Magazine of the Art Studio, Inc., Beaumont, Texas.

• “Do You Have To Be Gay To Take This Class?” and “Lessons from LGBT Lit.” Poems. Megan Volpert, ed. This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching. Alexander, Ark.: Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013. (Anthology named to American Library Association 2014 Over the Rainbow List; Split This Rock Top Three Poetry Anthologies of 2014; Lambda Literary Award Finalist 2014.)

• “Landscape.” Poem. Lavender Review 5 (Summer 2012): http://lavrev.net/gardens/moore.html. Reprinted in Poetry at Round Top 2012. Round Top, TX: Poetry at Round Top Festival Institute, 2012, 39.

• “Meditation for After an Earthquake.” Poem and visual art collaboration with artist Joel Haber. Broadsided Japan Issue (June 2011).

• “Cinnamon Rolls,” “Acts of Devotion,” and “Baby-Daddy.” Poems. Sinister Wisdom 83 (Summer 2011): 60-65.

• “Epiphanies Lost and Found.” Personal essay. The Austin Project Archive: Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic. Eds. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth. Austin University of Texas Press, 2010. 328-337.

• “The Body Remembers.” Poem. The Austin Project Archive: Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic. Eds. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 120-123.

• “My Homosexual Agenda.” Personal essay. Burnt Orange Britannia: British Studies at the University of Texas. Ed. Wm. Roger Louis. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. 866-880.