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Speakers

The Virtual Dickens Universe 2020 Speakers
	Jacqueline Barrios is a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA's studying London and 19th-century British/American literature. Her project investigates London-Pacific transurban imaginaries—geographies of East Asian Pacific Rim entanglement with the British capital. Jacqueline’s research connects to her teaching practice as a veteran public school teacher of underrepresented youth in South Los Angeles, for whom she directs LitLabs, using experimental humanities and performance to imagine what it means to be a 21st-century urban teen reader of the 19th-century novel.
	Jennifer DeVere Brody is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Her books, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (2008), discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies, and performance. She worked with Nicholas Boggs on the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man, and is writing a new book about the race, sculpture, and performance.
	Ronjaunee Chatterjee lives in Montreal and teaches feminist, queer, and critical race theory, as well as courses on the 19th century, at Concordia University. She is finishing a book manuscript entitled “Thinking Singularity: Gender, Form, and Difference in the Nineteenth-Century,” which offers a new account of the nineteenth-century’s liberal-capitalist development of modern subjectivity. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues.
	Alicia Mireles Christoff is Associate Professor of English at Amherst College. She is the author of Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), and of essays in PMLA, NOVEL, Victorian Studies, VLC, LARB, and Public Books, among other venues.
	Brigitte Fielder, is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is (with Jonathan Senchyne) co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African-American Print. Her first book, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America is forthcoming from Duke University Press in October 2020. She is currently working on a book on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century.
	Ryan Fong is an associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College, where he also directs the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program. He has published articles and short essays in Victoriographies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Studies. He is currently at work on a book project about indigeneity and empire in Victorian literature, which has grown out of the keynote lecture he gave on Dombey and Son at the 2016 Dickens Universe.
	Gretchen H. Gerzina has written or edited nine books, and numerous articles, on Black Studies and British Studies. These include Black England: Life before Emancipation; Black Victorians/Black Victoriana; a biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett and several editions of The Secret Garden; and Mr. and Mrs. Prince. Her latest book is Britain’s Black Past, based on a ten-part Radio 4 series she presented. She has been the Eastman Professor at Oxford, the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, and is the Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2019 to the American Antiquarian Society.
	Daniel Hack is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005) and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017). He also edits the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.
	Sophia Hsu, Lehman College, CUNY
	Tricia Lootens is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University of Georgia. A longtime Dickens Universe participant, she is the author of Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres (Princeton, 2017).
	Meredith McGill teaches American literature and culture at Rutgers University. She attends Dickens Universe whenever she can, and has given talks at the sessions devoted to The Pickwick Papers and Martin Chuzzlewit. A chapter of her book, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (UPenn Press, 2003) is devoted to Dickens's 1842 tour of the United States and its aftermath, focusing on Dickens's and his American readers' mutual misunderstanding. She has also edited a collection of essays of interest to Victorianists: The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (Rutgers, 2008).
	Koritha Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching, editor of the Broadview Edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy and author of From Slave Cabins to the White House. She is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University. Follow her @ProfKori.
	Carla L. Peterson is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. She specializes in nineteenth-century African American literature, culture, and history and has published numerous essays in this field. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011), and is currently working on a new project, Urbanity and Taste: The Making of African American Modernity in Antebellum Philadelphia and New York, 1820-1865.
	Jason Rudy is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) and Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (2009). He is currently writing an authorized biography of the Indigenous Australian painter Gordon Syron.
	Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and Black speculative fiction. He is author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and a General Editor for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature (forthcoming).
	Alisha Walters is an Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at Penn State University, Abington College. Her work examines representations of race and racial mixture in nineteenth-century fiction and culture. She also writes about colonial and literary depictions of food, as she considers the ties between what Victorians wrote about food and the process of constructing national identity.
	Nazera Sadiq Wright is Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), which won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her Digital Humanities project, DIGITAL GI(RL)S: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century documents the cultural activities of black girls living in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. The Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded research for her second book, Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries.