Issue 15.3 (Winter 2019)

Contributor Biographies

Mary A. Armstrong is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College, where she also chairs the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her work focuses on representations of sexuality in Victorian fiction with an emphasis on readings that open canonical texts to new interpretations around desire and pleasure. She has published in Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, and LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, among other venues.

Katy Birch is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at Aberystwyth University. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s writing, with particular interests in humorous writing and literary responses to Darwinism. She has previously published in Women: A Cultural Review and in Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period, edited by Alexis Easley, Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a monograph on women’s contributions to Punch magazine between 1868 and 1918.

Heidi Liedke is assistant professor at the English Department at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, and from 2018-2020 Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, working on her second monograph (working title: Livecasting in the Context of 21st Century British Theatre. Spectacle, Materiality, Engagement). She obtained her PhD in 2016 at the University of Freiburg, Germany, with a dissertation that explored the experience of idleness in Victorian travel writing and for which she was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the German Association for the Study of English in 2018. Heidi’s research interests are Victorian travel texts, idling in literature, contemporary British theatre and performance theory. Her book The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901 (Palgrave Macmillan) and her co-edited book on Muße und Moderne (Idleness and Modernity) (Mohr Siebeck) were published in 2018.