Louisa Mackenzie grew up in Scotland and did her graduate work in Berkeley, California before moving to the UW in 2002. Her research focus is primarily on early modern French culture which she reads through various contemporary critical lenses including ecocriticism and, more recently,  Animal Studies. Her book The Poetry of Place: Lyric, Landscape and Ideology in Renaissance France (University of Toronto Press, 2010) is an interdisciplinary study of how a subjective and affective sense of place was produced by poetry in dialogue with cartography, land use history and other knowledge spheres. Other teaching interests include women's writing from all periods, travel writing, science fiction and utopic/dystopic literature, queer theory , and film. She is currently starting a book-length project on animals as "queer bodies of knowledge" in 16th-century France. Community activities include volunteering with the GSBA scholarship fund, providing academic scholarships to LGBT-identified students. She has also served as a College Board Commissioner for AP French.