Ania Loomba

Loomba was born on 7 August 1955 in India. Her parents were both members of the Communist Party of India. Her father was a trade unionist and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her background shaped her interest in Marxist and feminist politics.^[2] She studied at the University of Delhi, where she received her BA, MA and MPhil degrees, before moving to England to study at the University of Sussex, where she received her PhD.^[1] She was a student during the Miners' Strike of the 1970s, an experience she has cited as formative.^[2]

Loomba began her teaching career at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. She later held positions at the University of Tulsa (1992–1993) and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.^[1] At Penn, she holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the Department of English and is also affiliated faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women's Studies.^[1] She is co-series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press).^[3]

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Her first book, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press, 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992), examined Renaissance theatrical texts through the lens of race and colonialism.^[1]

Her second book, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; 2nd ed. 2005; 3rd ed. 2015), is a widely used introductory text in postcolonial studies. It has been translated into Italian, Turkish, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Swedish, and Polish.^[1] Reviewers have described it as "essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial studies"^[4] and "the best general introduction to the field."^[4] The third edition added material on globalisation, indigenous peoples' struggles, temporality, and the relationship between premodern and contemporary forms of racism.^[4]

Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002) examines England's early contacts with India, the Moluccas, and Turkey, situating Shakespeare's plays within the emerging history of global colonialism.^[1]

Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016) brings together scholarship that repositions gender as inseparable from race and sexuality in the study of the early modern period.^[5]

Her monograph Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism and Feminism in India (Routledge, 2018) examines the lives of militant-nationalist and communist women in India from the late 1920s to the 1960s, when the communist movement fractured. Using memoirs, autobiographies, novels, documents, and interviews, it traces how these women negotiated, and were constrained by, the gendered norms of Indian political culture.^[6]

Loomba also produced a critical edition of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011). Her published essays address early modern global contact, race and embodiment, caste and racial philosophy, and race in modern India.^[1]

Loomba has co-edited the following scholarly collections:

• Post-colonial Shakespeares (co-edited with Martin Orkin; Routledge, 1998)^[1]

• Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (co-edited with Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty; Duke University Press, 2005)^[7]

• Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (co-edited with Jonathan Burton; Palgrave, 2007)^[1]

• South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose; Duke University Press, 2012)^[1]

• Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race and Sexuality (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez; Routledge, 2016)^[1]

• A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018)^[7]

In 2022, Loomba was selected to receive the Charles Homer Haskins Medal from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), one of the most distinguished honours in the American humanities, recognising a lifetime of contribution to humanistic learning. She delivered the Haskins Prize Lecture at the ACLS Annual Meeting in Baltimore on 3 May 2024.^[8]

Loomba and co-editor Melissa Sanchez received the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) Award for Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies.^[5]

In September 2023, Loomba was among 36 Penn faculty members who signed an open letter published in The Daily Pennsylvanian expressing support for the Palestine Writes Literature Festival and responding to a statement by Penn's president Liz Magill that had raised concerns about antisemitism associated with certain festival speakers. The faculty letter argued that the president's statement equated criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism, and raised broader concerns about academic freedom.^[9]

In November 2023, Loomba was among more than 1,200 signatories to a statement published on Jadaliyya, titled "Feminists for a Free Palestine," which called for an end to what the signatories described as a genocide in Gaza and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The statement was signed by scholars in feminist, queer, and trans studies. It affirmed opposition to colonialism, military occupation, and ethnic cleansing, and committed its signatories to resisting the suppression of academic freedom on university campuses.^[10]

In May 2024, Loomba published an essay in support of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, in which she called on the university to disclose its financial holdings and to amend its investment policy to divest from companies she argued were profiting from Israel's military operations in Gaza and the occupation of Palestinian territories.^[11]