Victorian Poetry Caucus @ NAVSA
An inclusive space of collaboration, scholarship, and community
Meet Our Organizers
Coordinating Members of the VPC
Francesca Colonnese
Ph.D. Candidate,
University of Washington
Francesca Colonnese is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Washington. Her research uses the cognitive science of temporal perception to describe how poetry affects and changes a reader's sense of felt time. Time becomes a malleable quality through poetry's sound patterns, rhythms, and depictions of time itself. Her dissertation applies these observations to the poetry of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, and others. She can also be found as a co-writer of “Coreading Middlemarch in Pandemic Times: Using Digital Humanities to Build Community at a Distance.” in George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, which considered the utility of Digital Humanities projects during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is the current Graduate Student Coordinator.
Imogen
Forbes-Macphail
Junior Fellow,
Harvard University
Imogen Forbes-Macphail is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where she is working on her current book project, Line and Number: Formal Problems in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Mathematics. Her research contends that mathematics can transform our understanding of nineteenth-century poetry by providing a new formal vocabulary with which to articulate the formal innovations of the era. Recent publications include “Topological Poetics: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nineteenth-Century Mathematics, and the Principle of Continuity” (ELH, 2021), and “‘Colours of the Dying Dolphin’: Nineteenth-Century Defences of Literature and Mathematics” (The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics, 2021). Her next major project will focus on the influence of the Indian algebraic tradition on nineteenth-century mathematical and poetic thought. She is the current Caucus Representative for VPC.
Amy Kahrmann Huseby
Associate Teaching Professor, Florida International University
Amy Kahrmann Huseby is Associate Teaching Professor at Florida International University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature. She has work published or forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Women’s Writing, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, South Atlantic Review, and in several edited collections. Her own poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Review, Pearl, and Wilderness House Literary Review, among others. She serves as Editor for Victoriographies (Edinburgh University Press), and she is currently at work on both The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing (forthcoming 2026) and The Verse Dramas of Michael Field (forthcoming 2027). Amy founded the Victorian Poetry Caucus in 2016 to create a scholarly community for those whose work emphasizes nineteenth-century poetry, prosody, and poetics.
Meet Our Advisors
Advising Members of the VPC
Veronica Alfano Melissa Valiska Gregory Elizabeth Howard
Linda Hughes Rachael Isom Charles LaPorte Lindsey O'Neil
Jason Rudy Marjorie Stone (emerita) Heather Bozant Witcher
Christopher Adamson
Education Technology Integrationist, University of South Dakota
Christopher Adamson is an Education Technology Integrationist at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of South Dakota. He has published articles in the Academy of Management Review and postmedieval, and his research centers on Victorian medievalism and the intersection of liturgy and literature. His current project proposes that understanding the use of liturgical forms in Victorian texts enables a more nuanced view of literature than the secularization narrative provides and can even shed light on the way we currently receive the Victorian past or wield medieval discourses.
Veronica Alfano
Lecturer, Macquarie University
Veronica Alfano is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in gender, genre, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman. With Andrew Stauffer, she is co-editor of the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies; with Lee O’Brien, she edited the Summer 2019 special issue of Victorian Poetry. In 2018, her article “Technologies of Forgetting: Phonographs, Lyric Voice, and Rossetti’s Woodspurge” was awarded the Donald Gray Prize. Her current projects include an anthology of Victorian verse (co-edited with Erik Gray and forthcoming from Broadview Press) and a monograph that examines neologisms in the work of Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, and others. She and Thomas Austenfeld recently began a new series, Anglophone Lyric Poetry and Poetics, with Lexington Books. She led the NAVSA Poetry Caucus from 2020 until 2023.
Barbara Barrow
Assistant Professor of British Literature, Point Park University
Barbara Barrow is Assistant Professor of English at Point Park University. Her areas of interest include literature and science and nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. She recently completed a book manuscript, Political Dialects: Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry, which examines the link between language-controversies and the rise of radical politics in Victorian Britain, and she is beginning a new project on Anglophone poetry and scientific culture in nineteenth-century India. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Periodicals Review. Her first novel is forthcoming from Lanternfish Press.
Bailey Betik
Ph.D. Student, Emory University
Bailey Betik is a Ph.D. student in English at Emory University. Her research interests focus on post/colonial approaches to Romantic and Victorian literature, primarily representations of the British Empire and India. A former public school teacher and Fulbright Scholar, she is also interested in how echoes of imperial education persist in postcolonial spaces and curriculum today.
Alexander Bubb
Senior Lecturer in English, Roehampton University
Alex Bubb is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London. His first book, Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (OUP), was a study of the rivalry between two late Victorian contemporaries, and their pursuit of political authority. It won the University English Book Prize in 2017. More recently he has become interested in translation and the history of reading, investigating the many popular translations that were made from Asian languages after 1845, and which were designed to make texts like the Quran or the Ramayana accessible to the Victorian general readership. He recently published an article in Comparative Critical Studies, ‘The Race for Hafiz’, which shows how a number of translators competed in the 1880s and 1890s to produce a definitive English version of the Persian lyric poet.
Pearl Chaozon Bauer
Associate Professor of English, Notre Dame de Namur University
Pearl Chaozon Bauer is Associate Professor of English at Notre Dame de Namur University where she teaches courses in literature and film, writing, and community engagement. She publishes on Victorian marriage poems and pedagogy that bridge indigenous knowledge with abolitionist education. Currently, she leads the digital humanities project “Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom” which provides practical ways to assist 19th-century scholars and faculty teach a more diverse, antiracist Victorian studies. Motivated by transformational and collaborative leadership models, her research, teaching, community engagement, course development and curriculum design are informed by Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, Gender and LGBTQIA+ Studies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Peace Studies methods and philosophy. For fun, she teaches yoga and meditation, leads fermentation and pickling workshops, hunts for mushrooms, and learns about birds.
James Diedrick
Professor of English, Agnes Scott College
James Diedrick teaches and writes about Victorian literature and culture, British fiction, and film. He received his BA at Western Washington University and his PhD at the University of Washington. He is the author of Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (University of Virginia Press, 2016); Understanding Martin Amis (University of South Carolina, 1995; revised and expanded edition, 2004); and co-editor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). He is currently researching the Eminent Women series of biographies, published between 1883 and 1885, and writing an essay on Elizabeth Robins Pennell's contribution to the series, her 1884 biography of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Karen Dieleman
Professor of English, Redeemer University
Karen Dieleman (PhD, McMaster) is Professor of English at Redeemer University. She is the author of Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (2012). Her additional article publications on these poets and others, such as Emily Pfeiffer and Alice Meynell, similarly explore the complexities of religion and theology in their work.
Martin Dubois
Assistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Durham University, UK
Martin Dubois is an Assistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Durham University, UK. His interests include Victorian poetry and poetics, especially Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Barnes, Victorian literature and religion, dialect poetry, and nonsense writing. His book Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. He is now working on an article on Edward Lear and the colonial production of nonsense, and preparing a chapter for The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, ed. Anna Barton and James Williams.
Jill Ehnenn
Professor of English, Appalachian State University
Jill Ehnenn is Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she also teaches in the Gender, Womens and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (Ashgate/Routledge 2008), Michael Field's Revisionary Poetics (Edinburgh UP, 2023) and of various essays on writers such as Michael Field, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Elizabeth Siddal, Lucas Malet, and Dorothy Wordsworth. In general, she is interested in feminist, queer, and disability studies approaches to nineteenth-century literature and visual culture that take into consideration both historical and formal analysis. Currently, she co-authoring a biography of Michael Field with Sharon Bickle and she is also working on a book tentatively titled Art Objects and English Words: Ekphrasis and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century "World."
Dino Franco Felluga
Professor of Literature, Theory, and Culture, Purdue University
Dino Franco Felluga is professor of Literature, Theory, and Culture at Purdue University. He is the author of The Perversity of Poetry and is currently completing a book titled Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form. His other books are on theory (Critical Theory: The Key Concepts) and the Victorian period at large (The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature). He was the first president of NAVSA (2003-2014) and currently serves as Web Developer for the organization. He has developed BRANCH and COVE for NAVSA.
Dominique Garcia
School Manager, University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Dominique Gracia works at University College London and specialises in Victorian literature, short fiction and poetry. She's fascinated by things that come up again and again, and run below the surface, from Greek mythology to cultural tropes that just won't die, and the emotions that carry them along. Her particular interests include ekphrasis and adaptation, the mnemonic functions of sculpture, and haunting through art objects, and authors such as Michael Field, Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, and the Brownings. Her scholarly work has been published in various edited collections and journals, including Word&Image and Victorian Poetry.
Mary Ellis Gibson
Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature, Colby College
Mary Ellis Gibson is Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature at Colby College and author of Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance and Rebellion (Anthem Press, 2019). Her monograph and her critical anthology, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913 (both from Ohio UP), argue for the significance of poetry in the creation of English language literary culture in South Asia. Her recent essay, “Regionalism and Provincialism” in the Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, lays out a theoretical approach to issues of the local and the global, dialects and canonicity. Other monographs on Robert Browning’s experiments and on Ezra Pound and the Victorians work at the intersection of poetry, politics, and history.
Erik Gray
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Erik Gray is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Poetry of Indifference, from the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (2005); Milton and the Victorians (2009); and most recently The Art of Love Poetry (2018). The last is a transhistorical study that tries, not always successfully, not to be too Victorian in its focus. He is also the editor of the Norton edition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (3rd edition 2020), among other things. At the moment he is still thinking about forms of love in Victorian poetry.
Associate Professor of English at the University of Toledo
Melissa Gregory is is an Associate Professor as well as the Honors Advisor for the English Department. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and has published articles on both Victorian poetry and the novel. She is a founding member of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) and currently serves on the Executive Board. With Dr. Melisa Klimaszewski of Drake University, she has edited and introduced three of Charles Dickens’s collaboratively written Christmas stories for Hesperus Press—The Wreck of the Golden Mary (2006), Somebody’s Luggage (2006), and Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions (2007)—and has also coauthored an original brief biography of Dickens (2008). In addition to her primary specialty, she teaches a special section of English 2730 titled “Poetry of the Body.”
Emily Harrington
Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder
Emily Harrington teaches and writes about Victorian literature, poetry and poetics, aestheticism, and women’s writing. She received her BA from Wesleyan University and her PhD from the University of Michigan. Harrington’s writing examines the place of poetry in Victorian culture, addressing questions of how poetry shapes and is shaped by experience. Her first book, Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse, argues that women poets viewed lyric poetry as relational and interactive, rather than as an expression of a solitary soul, focusing on “thou” as much as “I.” Harrington’s next project, The Poetics and Politics of Waiting in Victorian Poetry, will investigate temporality and a dynamics of deferral in a variety of poets. For a number of Victorian poets, action can be counterproductively rash and patience is required for both aesthetic and social progress.
Elizabeth Helsinger
Professor Emerita of English, Art History, and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago
Elizabeth Helsinger (Beth) is John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of English, Art History, and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Her monographs include Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (2008) and Poetry and the Thought of Song (2015). Her new book, Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry is due out from Cambridge in September 2022. Among recent and forthcoming articles and book chapters are: "Picturing Music: Doubling Ekphrasis in Six Rossetti Sonnets," Journal of Victorian Culture, forthcoming 2022; "Contingent Lyrics: Christina Rossetti's Verse and Poems," in Victorian Verse, ed. Lee Behlman and Olivia Moy (forthcoming); "A Song, the Sea, and a Listening Boy: Whitman, Swinburne, Delius," in Song Beyond the Nation, ed. Philip Ross Bullock and Laura Tunbridge (2021); "A Question of Ornament: Poetry and the Lesser Arts," in The Routledge Companion to William Morris, ed. Florence Boos (2021); "Swinburne's Expansive Poetics," in Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics, ed. Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby (2020); and "Haunted by Voice," in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry, ed. Linda Hughes (2019).
Elizabeth Howard
PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota
Elizabeth Howard recently received her PhD in English literature from the University of Minnesota. She works with verse culture, material studies, transnational circulation, and adaptation in the long Nineteenth-century. Her other research interests include representations of natural catastrophe in the periodical press, and classical and biblical reception. She has published work in Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Poetry, Religion and the Arts, and Victorian Periodicals Review. She previously served as the graduate student assistant for the VPC.
Esther Hu
Lecturer, Boston University
Esther Hu (Ph.D. Cornell) serves on the faculty of Boston University, where she teaches Shakespeare, British and American Literature, Victorian Literature, Chinese Literary Translation (in the MFA Program for Literary Translation) and Writing. She is a Faculty Fellow at the International History Institute and Affiliated Faculty of the Center for the Study of Asia, Pardee School of Global Studies. In the Greater Boston area, she is an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. In recent years Dr. Hu has published over a dozen essays, book reviews, or encyclopedia entries in the field of Victorian Studies, including on Victorian women’s poetry and poetics (see “Lyric Poetry” in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing [Springer]). She is writing a research monograph on Christina Rossetti.
Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University
Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at TCU, specializes in historical media studies (poetry, periodicals, serial fiction); gender and women’s studies; and transnationality. Past monographs include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (2010), Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (2005), and The Victorian Serial (with Michael Lund, 1991). She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s
Poetry (2019). She has additionally co-edited with Sharon M. Harris the 4-volume, transhistorical Feminist Reader: From Sappho to Satrapi (2013); with Julie Codell, Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-Makings and
Reproductions (2018); and with Sarah R. Robbins and Andrew Taylor, Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920 (2022). Her monograph Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (2022) includes attention to the poetry of Anna Jameson, Mary Howitt, Michael Field, and Amy Levy as well as poetic translations by Howitt and Levy.
Assistant Professor of English, Arkansas State University
Rachael Isom is Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas State University. Her research focuses on intersections of religious and poetic identity in nineteenth-century British women's writing. She has recently published articles in the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, Studies in Romanticism, and the Keats-Shelley Review. Her current book project traces the development of the female enthusiast figure in Romantic and Victorian poetics.
Vincent A. Lankewish
Professional Performing Arts H.S., Manhattan
Vincent A. Lankewish teaches Humanities and AP English at the Professional Performing Arts H.S. in Manhattan. He has a B.A. in English and Journalism from NYU; an M.Phil. in 19th-Century British Literature from Merton College, Oxford; an Ed.M. in School Leadership from Bank Street College of Education; and a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers-New Brunswick. He is completing a book manuscript, entitled Seeing through the Marriage Plot: Same-Sex Marriage, Queer Vision, and the Rise of Ophthalmology in Victorian Literature. His articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Studies, College Literature, Pedagogy, and English Journal.
Professor of English, University of Washington
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Charles LaPorte is Professor of English at the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle, USA. His scholarship addresses the relationship between poetry, cultural value, and religion in the legacy of Romanticism, and it asks why certain subgenres are valued over others, and under what conditions those genres and values evolve. His most recent monograph, The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2021) explores the religious tenor of nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism. His first book, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Virginia, 2011) was awarded (alongside Sadiah Qureshi’s Peoples on Parade) the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for a best first book in Victorian studies. He serves on the editorial boards of MLQ and Review 19.
Hee Eun Helen Lee
Assistant Professor, Taejae University
Hee Eun Helen Lee is an Assistant Professor at Taejae University in Seoul. She specializes in 19th-century British poetry, with research interests in musical aesthetics, religion, and botany. Her work has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Review19, and is forthcoming in Victoriographies. Her current project examines the cultivation and naturalization of exotic flora in Victorian Britain and its representations in poetry.
Naomi Levine
Assistant Professor of English, Yale University
Naomi Levine is an assistant professor of English at Yale University, where she teaches classes on Victorian poetry and aesthetics, love and desire, the history of poetry, and the history of criticism. Her first book, The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press), examines nineteenth-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for the theory and practice of Victorian poetry and for the development of literary studies. She is also at work on a second project, “Badness in Poetry,” about twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems. Naomi's essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, Victorian Literature and Culture, MLQ, and Literature Compass.
Josh King
Associate Professor of English, Baylor University
Joshua King is Associate Professor of English at Baylor University and current holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at the Armstrong Browning Library. He is author of Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (Ohio State 2015) and coeditor, with Winter Jade Werner, of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (Ohio State, May 2019). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on poetics, religion, print culture, and, more recently, ecotheological and environmental perspectives in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keble, John Henry Newman, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many others. His current book project, The Body of Christ, the Body of the Earth: Poetry, Ecology, and Christology, shows how nineteenth-century British poets affirmed the solidarity of the Church, Christ's body, with creation, stressing the interconnection of Christians, Christ, and creatures through sacred spaces, worship, theological reflection, and the medium of poetry.
Ashley Miller
Associate Professor of English, Albion College
Ashley Miller is an associate professor of English at Albion College and author of Poetry, Media, and the Material Body (Cambridge, 2018). Her work on long-nineteenth-century poetry, physiology, and print culture has also appeared in journals including Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Studies in Romanticism. She's currently working on a new project exploring reproduction, elegy, and waste in Victorian culture.
Emma Mincks
PhD Candidate, University of New Mexico
Emma is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico in British and Irish Literary studies. They research eighteenth and nineteenth-century transnational cultural and environmental impacts of the global industrial movements on body and subjectivity politics, focusing on discourse patterns of Victorian colonial rhetoric of selfhood. Emma's current project deals with what she terms "affective orality" through study of symbolic depictions of teeth and the geopolitics of emotion and oral space in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Independent Scholar
Lindsey E. R. O'Neil received her PhD from University of MD College Park in 2021. Dr. O’Neil has essays published and forthcoming on the intersection of early psychological thought and women's poetry. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, and a volume entitled Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies. She coordinates NAVSA's Race and Transimperialism Reading Group.
Patricia Rigg
Professor Emerita of English and Theatre, Acadia University
Patricia Rigg is Professor Emerita of English and Theatre at Acadia University. She focuses broadly on gender studies and nineteenth-century culture and more specifically on autobiography and sequenced poetry. Publications include Robert Browning’s Romantic Irony in “The Ring and the Book” (1999), Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (2009), and A. Mary F. Robinson: Victorian Poet and Modern Woman of Letters (2021). She has published essays in a variety of journals and guest-edited an edition of Victorian Poetry devoted to Augusta Webster in 2017. Her essay “Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s Sonnets of the Wingless Hours: Baudelaire, Neurasthenia, and Poetic Recovery” was published in Victorian Studies (2021). Her current book project is a SSHRC funded study of Baudelaire’s influence on the development of the Victorian autobiographical sonnet sequence.
Matthew Rowlinson
Professor of English, Western University
Matthew Rowlinson is a Professor of English and a member of the core faculty in the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western University, in London, Ontario. He is the author of Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge, 2010) and Tennyson’s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (Virginia, 1994), as well as articles and reviews on literature of the Victorian and Romantic periods. He has edited Tennyson’s In Memoriam (Broadview, 2014) and contributed an essay on Darwin and Romanticism to the collection Marking Time (2017). His main current research project is a study of biopolitics, poetics, and taxonomy in the nineteenth century.
University of Maryland, College Park
Jason Rudy is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park; the past president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; and a member of the Historical Poetics Working Group. He also currently directs the English Honors program at UMD and serves on the advisory boards of the journals Victorian Studies and Victorian Poetry. His research focuses on nineteenth-century literature in English, especially poetry. Jason is committed to thinking globally about the circulation of literature, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. most recent book, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies, is a study of poetry written by nineteenth-century British emigrants in colonial spaces, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2017.
Julia Saville
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Professor Emerita, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Julia F. Saville is Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000) and Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic (2017) and she has published in journals such as Victorian Poetry, ELH, and SEL. Her current project, provisionally entitled Victorian Ecopoets and the Problem of Humankind, focuses on the ecological impacts of anthropocentrism in the nineteenth century. Drawing on eco-poetics, animal studies, and post-humanist theory, it considers the ethical challenges that poets such as John Clare, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins present to human-centered habits of thought.
Jessica Sherrill
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Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
Jessica Sherrill is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Memory Machines: Mnemonics, Poetry, and Computing in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” argues that the Victorian mnemonics industry first theorized central concepts of modern computing, including random-access memory, executable programming languages, and universal machines. The project traces the winding intellectual lineage of these concepts through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the philosophical debates of Scottish Common Sense associationism through the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll to the early twentieth century musical-hall mnemonics performances. She recently published an article in Criticism entitled “'The Stain of Breath Upon a Mirror'”: The Unitary Self in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that analyzes the interplay between literary form, scientific materialism, and Victorian philosophy of consciousness.
Clare Stainthorp
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow; Queen Mary, University of London
Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and the forms of writing in their periodicals. One strand of this work focuses on the poetry that Victorian freethinkers chose to celebrate life events. Her book, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published by Peter Lang in 2019. She co-edited the Routledge volume Nineteenth Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs with Naomi Hetherington (2020). Her work has also appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Journal of Victorian Culture.
McCulloch Professor of English at Dalhousie University
Marjorie Stone is McCulloch Professor of English at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. She is the author of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995), co-editor of Literary Couplings (2006), co-editor of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (Broadview, 2009) and Volume Co-Editor for 3 of 5 volumes in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010). She has also published on Robert Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson, and on sex trafficking, cultural citizenship, multiculturalism, and the corporate university. Recent articles and essays treat Frederick Douglass and abolitionism (Teaching Transatlanticism, 2015), Victorian periodical debates over Aurora Leigh and Poems before Congress (BRANCH, 2015, 2017), the Anacreontic lyric tradition in the poetry of EBB and Emily Dickinson (VP, 2016), and “Politics, Protest, Interventions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (ed. Linda K. Hughes, 2019).
Doreen Thierauf
Assistant Professor of English, North Carolina Wesleyan College
Doreen Thierauf is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in British literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on women’s writing, sexuality, gender-based violence, and romance has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women’s Writing, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions.
Sarah Weaver
Program Manager, Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University
Sarah Weaver's research centers on nineteenth-century Britain's sense of its relation to the past, particularly the influence of historical linguistics on literature and scholarship. She has published and presented work on Victorian philology, historical rhyme, tongue twisters, and Edward Lear's musical compositions. Her first book, tentatively titled Tennyson’s Philological Medievalism, is forthcoming from Boydell & Brewer. Sarah is a program manager at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University and served as the first Non-Traditionally Employed Representative to the Advisory Board of the North American Victorian Studies Association. She is also a regular participant in the theatrical productions of NAVSA's Nineteenth-Century Theatre Caucus.
Stephanie Weiner
Professor of English, Wesleyan University
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner is professor of English at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in Romantic and Victorian literature and in poetry and poetics. She is the author of Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford, 2014) and Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave, 2005). Her articles have appeared in journals including Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and English Literature in Transition. Her current research project, tentatively titled The Sister Tongue, examines translations within English, either across time—from earlier to later versions of the language—or space—from regional dialects to the metropolitan standard, and back again.
Phyllis Weliver
Professor of English, Saint Louis University
Phyllis Weliver writes on the connections among literature, music and other aspects of Victorian life, including sociability. This scholarship takes the form of digital resources like Sounding Tennyson (soundingtennyson.org) and traditional print publications, including an edited book, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-century British Poetry (2005; 2016) and recent monograph, Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (2017). Her work on the salon engages the wider public through an episode for “The Essay” on BBC Radio 3 (listen here) and a reenactment of a historical musical salon for the British Academy’s annual open house.
Assistant Professor of English, Auburn University at Montgomery
Heather Bozant Witcher specializes in Victorian poetry and prose, British nineteenth-century life-writing, collaborative writing, archival studies, and digital humanities. Her research uses the literary archive to explore diversity and connections between the creative process and lived communal experience. Her first book, Sympathetic Texts: Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century, explores sympathetic collaboration and retrieves marginal and divergent voices that have been elided or silenced by the prevailing model of solitary authorship. Her current research theorizes the literary archive, using the Pre-Raphaelite archive as a case study. She was the 2016 Amy P. Goldman Fellow in Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and recipient of the 2016 William Morris Award. She is the co-editor (with Amy Kahrmann Huseby) of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (Palgrave, 2020), and has published articles in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, and Forum for Modern Language Studies.
Sharon Worley
Adjunct Instructor, Houston Community College
Sharon Worley received her PhD in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas, an MA in English from the University of Texas at Tyler, and an MA in Art History from Tufts University, USA. She currently teaches Humanities, Art History and English at area colleges in Houston, Texas, and is the former curator of the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts (1993-2000). She is the author of numerous publications on art history, literature and the humanities, including Love Letters during the Napoleonic Wars (2016) and The Legacy of Empire: Napoleon I and III and the Anglo-Italian Circle during the Risorgimento (2018).