Louisa Mackenzie (they / she)

Louisa Mackenzie grew up in Scotland and did graduate work in Berkeley, California before moving to the UW in 2002. Louisa's research interests include  early modern and contemporary Francophone and Anglophone culture, ecocriticism, Animal Studies, and gender studies, from a comparative perspective. Their first book The Poetry of Place (2011) is an interdisciplinary study of landscape and ideology in 16th-century poetry, articulating cartographic and land use histories with literary criticism. The book won an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association. With Stephanie Posthumus, Louisa co-edited a volume of academic essays on Animal Studies, French Thinking About Animals (2015). Their focus then shifted to transgender and non-binary identity formation, including pedagogical implications in the language classroom, and they have collaborated with Vinay Swamy at Vassar College on several related events and publications, including book-length edited collections in English (H-France Salon, "Legitimizing Iel", 2019,) and in French ("Devenir non-binaire", Le Manuscrit, 2022). They teach a broad variety of classes on many periods and themes, including science fiction, the "idea of Europe", and comparative gender studies. Community activities include volunteering with the GSBA scholarship fund, providing academic scholarships to LGBT-identified students. Louisa has also served as a College Board Commissioner for AP French. They are very involved in shared governance at the UW, and have served as Faculty Senate Chair in 2024-25.