Issue 16.2 (Summer 2020)

Contributor Biographies

Shuhita Bhattacharjee is Assistant Professor of English Literature (Department of Liberal Arts) at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. She completed her PhD at the University of Iowa and is currently working on two monographs, on the fin-de-siècle representation of colonial idols (Routledge USA) and on Postsecular Theory (Orient Blackswan). She has current and forthcoming publications on Victorian literature and culture and on the South-Asian diaspora in English Literature in Transition and Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, among others, and with Palgrave Macmillan, Edinburgh UP, and Lexington Books. She has also worked extensively in the social sector at national and international levels in the areas of sex education, gendered HIV-related violence, and sexual harassment.

Kimberly Cox is Assistant Professor at Chadron State College. Her book Touch, Sexuality, and Skin in British Literature, 1740–1900 is under contract with Routledge. It examines what literary representations of tactility reveal about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views on sexuality, sexual expression, and rape culture. Her articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorians: Journal of Culture and Literature, and Victorian Network. Her forthcoming article in The Wilkie Collins Journal extends her research into #MeToo, using it as a lens to urge reading for erasure in Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels that gloss over female characters' experiences of economically, sexually, and racially-charged colonial violence.

Lana L. Dalley is Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature, feminist literature, and feminist/gender theory. She is the co-editor of Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Ohio State UP). Her work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Women’s Writing, Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Poetry, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, among others. She is currently finishing a monograph on representations of political economy and the family in nineteenth-century women’s writing.

Anna Feuerstein is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa, and is the author of The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2019). Her current project examines the racialization of animal-human relationships across cultural histories of British slavery and empire.

Sara Hackenberg is Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University. She has published on nineteenth-century transatlantic popular literature, narrative seriality, visual culture, and early film. She is currently completing a monograph on the genre of mystery, titled “The Mysteries of Modern Life: Popular Narrative and the Politics of Vision.” Her next project is tentatively titled “Serial Narratology.”

Kellie Holzer is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, LGBTQ literature, feminism and technology, South Asian literature, and literary theory. She has published articles on Victorian matrimonial advertising, the colonial Indian novel, and the relationship of Victorian feminism and the New Woman to imperialism. Her work appears in Victorians Institute Journal, South Asian Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Victorian Review.

Jessica Mele is a student majoring in English at Penn State Harrisburg where she studies British and American literature, social inequities, and critical theory. She is currently a senior.

Douglas Murray is Professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is co-editor (with Margaret Doody) of Catharine and Other Writings (Oxford World’s Classics), a compilation of Austen’s miscellaneous works. His essays on Austen, Frances Trollope, Dryden, Swift, Pope and English Hymnody have appeared in Review of English Studies, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Persuasions and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Rebecca Richardson is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She is currently working on her first book project, examining how the Victorian concept of “self-help” suggests the ambivalent value of ambition in the context of expanding and violently competitive systems, from imperialism to industrial capitalism. Her essay in this special issue stems from another project, on portrayals of consent in nineteenth-century texts and their twenty-first century adaptations. Other work has appeared in Dickens Studies Annual, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Ellen Stockstill is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Harrisburg, where she teaches courses on British literature and critical theory. She is co-author of A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English. Recent publications include essays in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, Thomas Hardy Journal, Wilkie Collins Journal, Public Domain Review, and Nineteenth-Century Prose. She is currently completing a monograph on Victorian documentary novels.

Doreen Thierauf is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan College, 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 The Journal of Popular Culture, among others. Most recently, in 2019 her essay on marital rape in Daniel Deronda won the Surridge Prize for best article published in the Victorian Review. Thierauf has served as the Treasurer-Secretary of the British Women Writers Association since 2018.

Marlene Tromp is President and Professor of English at Boise State University.  She is the author of Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (SUNY 2006), The Private Rod: Sexual Violence, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (UP Virginia 2000), and over twenty essays and chapters on nineteenth-century culture. She has edited or co-edited and contributed to Abstracting Economics: Culture, Money, and the Economic in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio University Press 2016); Fear and Loathing: Victorian Xenophobia (Ohio State UP 2013); Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP 2007); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation (SUNY 2000). She is immediate Past-President of the North American Victorian Studies Association and serves on the Board of Directors of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Miranda Wojciechowski is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. In August, she completed her tenure as the Managing Editor of the journal Victorian Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the politics of heterosocial possibility in the Victorian novel.