Issue 13.1 (Spring 2017)

Contributor Biographies

Meg Dobbins is a Lecturer in English at Northern Arizona University. She received her PhD in English (with a certificate in women, gender, and sexuality studies) from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015. Her research and teaching interests include: nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, feminist theory, queer theory, and economic history. She is currently revising her dissertation, Queer Accounts: Victorian Literature and Economic Deviance for publication as monograph. An article drawn from that project, "Jane Eyre's Purse: Women's Queer Economic Desire in the Victorian Novel" was recently published at Victorian Literature and Culture.

Ian Higgins researches nineteenth-century history of emotions, and completed his PhD in 2015 with a thesis titled Boredom and Ennui in Victorian Culture: Language, Gender, and Society. He has previously taught at the University of Leicester and the University of Surrey, and now works in the School of Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Suyin Olguin is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Canada. She studies food, nutrition, and masculinity in the Victorian novel. She holds a Doctoral Award by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has two publications investigating food and vampiric appetites in Dracula, "A very Victorian Feast" (The Journal of Dracula Studies, 2013) and "Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire" (Revenant, 2015). “Feasting & Bonding like a Man” is part of her general work on food and Victorian childhood masculinity.

Katrina Peterson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Her book project examines the influence of humorous “minor” characters on narrative construction in nineteenth-century marriage novels, and her short biography of Susan Ferrier was published in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (2012). Research interests include novels of Romanticism, forgotten women writers, and studies of humor and the novel.  

Laura Rotunno is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Coordinator at Penn State Altoona as well as author of Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture (Palgrave, 2013). She is also an Associate Editor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory. Her current research project explores representations of athletically and academically active Victorian women.

Jessica Saxon is a faculty member in the English department at Craven Community College; she teaches British literature of the long nineteenth century, early American literature, and composition. She is also a PhD candidate at Old Dominion University. Her dissertation explores uses of paratextual and narratorial interventions in nineteenth-century British erotic, gothic, and sensation novels. In addition to her dissertation work, Jessica’s other two most recent projects include supplements to An Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing about the North Carolina community college system’s revamp of ENG 112 and a forthcoming chapter in Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama on Edmund Reid’s conflicting domestic and public duties in the BBC’s Ripper Street.

Talia Schaffer is a professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. Schaffer is the author of Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (2016); Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001). She has co-edited a special issue of Victorian Review, “Extending Families,” with Kelly Hager (2013); published a collection called Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006); produced a scholarly edition of Lucas Malet's 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and co-edited Women and British Aestheticism with Kathy A. Psomiades (1999). Schaffer has published widely on Victorian familial and marital norms, disability studies, women writers, material culture, popular fiction, and aestheticism. She is currently working on a project that adapts the feminist philosophy of “ethics of care” into a method for reading social relations in Victorian fiction.  

Zsuzsa Török is a research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Centre for Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include women’s writing, social history, periodical studies, comparative literature and Hungarian-British contacts in the nineteenth century. Her recently published article in English is entitled ?Sartorial Heroism and Nation-Building: Female Cross-Dressing in Nineteenth Century Hungarian Fiction. A Case Study’ (Hungarian Studies 30.1, 2016).

John Wiehl received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2014. He has interests that span nineteenth-century British literature, from poetry to novels, Romanticism to Victorianism. He has taught at Cornell College and currently teaches at Case Western Reserve University.