Deborah Lutz lives in Brooklyn. She is an Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture in the Department of English at Long Island University, C.W. Post. Her scholarship focuses on material culture; the history of attitudes toward death and mourning; the history of sexuality, pornography and erotica; and gender and gay studies. She is working on her fourth book, and her writing has also appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Victorian Literature and Culture; The Oxford History of the Novel in English, and Cabinet. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, Salon, New York Post, Dublin's News Talk Radio, The John Batchelor Radio Show, and The History Channel.Her current book is entitled The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects and will be published in 2015 by W. W. Norton. Hundreds of artifacts and manuscripts associated with the Brontë family--hair jewelry, desk boxes, walking sticks, needlework, letters and more--sit in archives in the United States and Europe. The accumulation of these "relics" grew out of a reverence for the Brontës as sacralized figures, a "faith" found in other authors of the period, especially Keats, Shelley, and Dickens. Cultural forces such as enlightenment individualism, sentimental intimacies between women, and craft fellowship led to a belief that materiality associated closely with the body had evidentiary and narrative powers. Taking an important Brontë artifact as the focal point for each chapter, this book uses precise biographical facts relating to the objects--many gleaned from close study of the artifacts themselves--and their place in the Brontës' writing to investigate the cultural history they illuminate. What results is an account of women's work in the home (including the labor of writing) and of close, collaborative relations between women. Her third book, which was supported in 2011 by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture mines the seam where literature and material culture meet. This book analyzes the collecting and revering of the artifacts and personal effects of the dead as affirmations that objects held memories and told stories. The love of these keepsakes in the 19th century speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, almost lost to us today. But more importantly, these practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life--not as generalized memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings whose loss needed to be always remembered.Her first book--The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006)--traces a literary history of characters whose eroticism comes from their dark past and rebellious exile from the comforts of everyday living. A much-revised version of her dissertation (directed by Eve Sedgwick and Avital Ronell), The Dangerous Lover explores a constellation of ideas that cluster around 19th- and early 20th-century Byronism, such as Heidegger's theories of proximity and the ontology of death and Benjamin and Barthes's understanding of the "outside," melancholy and radical forms of love. In his review of the book for the TLS, Michael Caines called it "a rhapsody of erudition."Her second book was published by Norton in 2011. Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism dives into 1860s and '70s London and the political freethinking and gender play of two intertwined bohemian groups--the Cannibal Club headed by Sir Richard Francis Burton and the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelites with D. G. Rossetti as leader. Truly interdisciplinary, this book considers the collaborative work of poets, painters, designers, politicians, and scientists and their impact on the nascent feminist movement and the just-developing awareness of sexual identity rights. The book brought numerous glowing reviews, such as Ariel Levy's essay for the New Yorker and Jonathon Yardley's review in The Washington Post. Deborah Rogers remarked in a London Times review that "Lutz provides a compelling exploration of the centrality of sexuality in defining identity and of the importance of Victorian art in shaping the social norms that would lead to our more sexually progressive society."