Myra Lotto received her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania

She has taught several courses at Penn for the Critical Writing program and the English department, receiving the Deans Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Graduate Student in 2007.

Her dissertation, titled The Rustic Mode: Representations of Rural Life, examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of the countryside, of village culture, and depictions of pastoral environs penned by working-class writers.

She is principally concerned with how and when the rural aesthetic became desirable and refined, reading this development in the poetry of Stephen Duck, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and the novels of Thomas Hardy.