Issue 17.2 (Summer 2021)

Contributor Biographies

Dr Eleanor Bird completed her PhD on Canada and Slavery in Transatlantic Print Culture at the University of Sheffield in 2018 and has published articles on Mary Prince and Susanna Moodie and forthcoming articles on slavery in Quebec’s newspapers. She has held visiting funded fellowships at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, the John Rylands Library and at the Nova Scotia Museum in Canada. Between 2018-19, Eleanor was the Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow based in the History Department at Lancaster University, a career development fellowship awarded annually by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies. In her current role, Eleanor is a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project, Humphry Davy’s Notebooks: How Poetry Helped Shape Scientific Knowledge, based in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, where she is researching into Davy's links with transatlantic slavery.

E.J. Clery is Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University. Her publications include: The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (2000); The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (2004); Jane Austen: The Banker’s Daughter (2017); and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She teaches and researches eighteenth-century and Romantic-era literature, book history and the cultural history of economics, and is currently working on a number of Wollstonecraft-related projects.

Dr Naomi Hetherington is University Tutor in English and Humanities in the Department for Lifelong Learning, University of Sheffield, and co-lead of the Gothic Bible Project in the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. She is General Editor of a new 4-volume Routledge Historical Resource on Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society (2020) and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal on Religion and Victorian Popular Literature and Culture with Clare Stainthorp (forthcoming 2023).

Flore Janssen is an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and in 2021 will take up a position as Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She has previously worked with Lisa C. Robertson on the digital archive The Harkives and the edited collection Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 (Manchester University Press, 2019). Her monograph Women’s Activism in the Transatlantic Consumers’ Leagues, 1885–1920 is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

Carly Nations is a recent M.A. recipient from the Sewanee School of Letters. While there, Carly published a new edition of Olive Schreiner’s Dreams with colleagues Dr. Barbara Black and Anna Spydell. The new edition of Dreams debuted with Broadview Press in October 2020. Her interests include embodiment in the literature of the long nineteenth century, particularly in the fin de siecle, and the relationship of the Medieval Period to the Victorian. She currently lives in Round Rock, TX with her husband, daughter, and a gang of animals, three dogs and a cat.

Lisa C. Robertson is Lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and, with Flore Janssen, the co-editor of Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921 (Manchester University Press, 2019).

Bee Rowlatt is a writer and journalist, who worked for more than two decades at BBC World Service. Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad (2010), co-authored by May Witwit (Penguin) was dramatised by the BBC and translated into numerous languages. She contributed to Virago’s Fifty Shades of Feminism (2013) and her book In Search of Mary (Alma, 2016) inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s travels in Scandinavia, won the Society of Authors’ K. Blundell Trust award. She writes for the UK and international press, and is a regular speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festivals in India, London and Belfast, among others. Since chairing the Mary on the Green campaign to memorialise Mary Wollstonecraft, she has become a founding Trustee of the human rights education charity the Wollstonecraft Society. Most recently she has written the play An Amazon Stept Out, about the life of Wollstonecraft, which premiered at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and currently programmes events at the British Library.

Clara Vlessing is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. Her PhD project looks at the cultural afterlives of women activists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing on those involved in social movements from roughly 1871 to 1945. It serves as a case study within the wider project ReAct (Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe since 1871), which analyses the relationship between civil resistance and cultural memory in Europe. Her research considers the representation of prominent activists Louise Michel (1830-1905), Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960).