Dickens in a Minute


    Susan Zieger on Cigarette Cards

  • Susan Zieger specializes in nineteenth-century British and related literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on the novel, ephemera, and other mass media forms. Her first book, Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), describes how metaphors of addiction such as exile, self-enslavement, and disease circulated through literature and culture to forge the new identity of the addict. Her second book, forthcoming from Fordham University Press in 2018, is The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century. The book contends that our twenty-first century moment of digital media saturation was formed through nineteenth-century encounters with printed ephemera. Zieger is currently researching Logistical Subjects, a cultural history of the rise of efficient shipping and transportation in commercial and military spheres since 1800.


  • Zoe Beenstock on Politics and Literature

  • Zoe Beenstock is a lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. Her book The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature came out in 2016 with Edinburgh University Press. Her newest project deals with Romantic Palestine. Zoe has published articles in European Romantic ReviewMLQ and Philosophy and Literature.


  • Mark Celeste on Maritime Fiction

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    Mark Celeste is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rice University. He studies maritime fiction and maritime networks during the British long nineteenth century. His dissertation examines how historical maritime genres (e.g., the logbook, the sea chantey, the shipwreck tale) make visible the exchanges between the literary marketplace and the political, social, and economic networks of the maritime world. His work has appeared in The Gaskell Journal, and he has a forthcoming article with Victorian Review.


  • Melisa Klimaszewski on Dickens Today

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    Related Video:
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    Dr. Melisa Klimaszewski is Associate Professor of English at Drake University where, in addition to Victorian studies, she specializes in critical race and gender studies and the literature of South Africa. She has edited nine of Dickens’s collaborative works for publication in their entirety with Hesperus Press. She has also authored a biography of Wilkie Collins and co-authored a brief biography of Charles Dickens for Hesperus. Her book-in progress examines Dickens's collaborative Christmas works to rethink collaboration in the Victorian periodical press.


  • Jennifer Tinonga-Valle on Needlework in Victorian Novels

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    Further Reading:
    Sewing Samplers by the Brontë Sisters and Jane Austen
    Sampled Lives, Sewing Samplers from the Fitzwilliam Museum
       
    A Ph.D. candidate in English at UC Davis, Jennifer Tinonga-Valle’s research explores how designing, discussing, and creating craft items offers a distinctive type of participation with literary texts, as it is linked with the still accessible legacy of craft practices and values, a legacy in which authors such as Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë participated.

  • Scott Caddy on Female Authorship

  • Scott Caddy is a PhD student in English Literature at Arizona State University. Scott's studies focus on Jane Austen, book history (18C and 19C), and digital humanities. Scott is also the chair of the Long 19th Century Colloquium at ASU and a social media intern for HASTAC@ASU.


  • Katie Brandt on Alcoholism and Addiction in Victorian Literature

  • Katie Brandt is a recent MA English literature graduate from San Francisco State University where her thesis research focused on the portrayal of alcoholism and addiction in Victorian realist novels. She attended the Dickens Universe for the first time in July 2017. Currently, Katie teaches English grammar and reading comprehension at ATS Institute of Technology, an accelerated nursing program in downtown Chicago.


  • Rebecca Ehrhardt on Free Indirect Discourse

  • Rebecca Ehrhardt is a Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she works on 18th and 19th century British literature, narrative theory, and the philosophy of language. Her current project focuses on character and reference in 19th-century poetry and prose.


  • Holly Fling on the Erosion of Temporal and Spacial Boundaries

  • Holly Simpson Fling is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Georgia, where she is studying Romantic and Victorian literature and working toward a Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. She was one of the 2016 organizers for the British Women Writers conference, and during the spring of 2018 she will serve her third term in Oxford as a graduate assistant for the UGA at Oxford Program. Holly was a 2016 recipient of a Willson Center Graduate Student Research Award, which she used to further her dissertation research during her time in Oxford. In her dissertation, Holly traces Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass into Virginia Woolf’s work, and then she reads nineteenth-century women-written fiction through Woolf’s adaptation of the looking-glass to call attention to the dissolution of boundaries between time and space, and between subject and object. She also has a book chapter in Critical Insights: Harlem Renaissance (Salem Press, 2015).


  • Lucy Whitehead on the Life of Charles Dickens

  • Related Image:

    Photograph of Dickens

    Lucy Whitehead completed her BA in English Literature at Cambridge University, and her MSt in English (1780-1900) at Oxford University. She is currently undertaking a PhD funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and co-supervised by Professor Holly Furneaux at Cardiff University, and Dr Daisy Hay at the University of Exeter. Provisionally titled ‘The Lives of Charles Dickens: A Metabiography 1870-present’, her dissertation investigates the genesis and evolution of Dickens biographies. In summer 2017 she held a three-month visiting AHRC-Huntington Fellowship at the Huntington Library in California.


  • Michael Hatch on Humanity and Literature

  • My research interests include 19th Century British Literature, Narrative Theory, and Detective Fiction.


  • Marissa Bolin Considers Marital Law through a Feminist Lens

  • My current research examines the use of women's physical writing, such as letters, marriage certificates, and diaries within Victorian novels as a way of providing women's testimonial and circumstantial evidence in the debate for marriage legal reform. I closely analyze novels by Anne Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Caroline Norton, George Meredith, Wilkie Collins, and Ellen Wood in correlation with contemporary legal trials and parliamentary debates surrounding marriage law. By revealing the prominence of such novels between 1838 and 1882, I argue that the genre of the 'legal novel' can be seen as a contributing factor to the growing discussions of married women's necessary legal rights.