Graduate Student Attendees

Alexia Mandla Ainsworth, Stanford University

Dissertation: "The Female Gothic and its Others: a Theory of Monstrosity"

Research Interests: Alexia Mandla Ainsworth (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. Alexia’s research centers on the “female gothic” genre, examining how the classification evolves through both definition by women and prescription by men. She has spoken at numerous conferences on the gothic genre, from its origins in Shakespeare to its relevance in modern video games. Her most recent publication, on Dracula and the epistolary form, looks more broadly to the genre-bending nature of mixed media in gothic literature. Her areas of interest include the female gothic, interpretations of the gothic across various mediums, theories of dialogue and dialectics, as well as discussions of identity and monstrosity.

Yasmin Akhter, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dissertation: "Cosmopolitanism in the Shadow of Empire: Life-Writing, Displacement, and Intersubjectivities, 1880-1920"

Research Interests: Yasmin's thesis explores migrants, exiles, and nomads as autobiographical subjectivities to argue for renewed scholarly attention to late-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanisms. Her broader research interests are in global anglophone literatures 19th century to present, postcolonial theories, cultural and colonial geographies, life-writing, travel writing, and decolonial pedagogies. 

Maria Al-Raes, Cornell University

Research Interests: Maria Al-Raes is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she works on the literature of the long nineteenth century, with a focus on failed and nonprogressive narratives of development in the British Bildungsroman. Her further research interests include theories of the novel, spectrality and the Gothic, cultural and aesthetic theory, Victorian visual and material culture, and animal studies.

Spencer Armada, UC Santa Cruz

Dissertation: “Sound, Selfhood, and the Social: Aurality and Narrative in the English Long Eighteenth Century”

Research Interests: History of the Novel, 18th-century studies, Sound Studies, Ethics

Anne Boylan, Indiana University

Research Interests: My research centers on Victorian liberalism and the queer politics of failed marriages in Victorian novels 1850-1870.

Lizzie V. Boyle, UC Berkeley

Research Interests: the history of early modern romance and the novel, including all forms of narrative and fictional messiness

Sanjana Chowdhury, Texas Christian University

Dissertation: "Uppers and Downers of Empire: A Transgeographical Study of Opium, Tea, and Sugar in the Long Nineteenth Century"

Research Interests: Long nineteenth-century British literature, postcolonial literature, food narratives, critical race theory, British Empire history.

Michael Ducker, Rutgers University

Research Interests: 20th-century American literature, theory of the novel, Marxist literary theory

Anya Eastman, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dissertation: "Memorialisation and Posthumous Curation: Locating Dickens, Eliot, and Wilde in an Evolving Heritage Sector"

Research Interests: I research the ways in which Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde have been curated by the heritage sector. My research is specifically interested in the relationship between material culture and memorialisation.

Huw Edwardes-Eans, Rice University

Research Interests: My research is chiefly concerned with the relationship between Anglophone poetry and transatlantic ceramic industry from 1750 through the nineteenth century, specifically as these index and advance competing constructions of what earth means in what it is, was, and might be.

Reymundo Escobedo, Cornell University

Research Interests: Reymundo Escobedo's research interests focuses on Victorian literature with a specific emphasis on the novel and its relation to fallen women narratives.

Samuel Evola, Indiana University

Dissertation: "Motivated Connections: Readers, Character Motivations, and the Victorian Novel"

Research Interests: I am broadly interested in the impressions that texts make upon their readers. My dissertation adopts empirical methods to learn about the ways character and event are related in readers' minds in the hopes of further illuminating the Victorian novel's role in the coming of modernity. I am also interested in the pedagogical and social implications of our ongoing relationships with texts and other media.

Ariane Farris, UC Santa Cruz

Research Interests: My research focuses on fictional representations of facial differences (scarred, disfigured, and monstrous faces) and the role that gender plays in how meaning is encoded into these representations. Other interests include memory and trauma, Afrofuturism, and Speculative Fiction. 

Daria Feldman Saadia, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Research Interests: Dystopian fiction, contemporary fiction, ekphrasis, fiction podcasting

Grace Gibson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Research Interests: My research interests span both the 18th and 19th centuries and cover issues of gender, disability, and the form of the novel. I primarily study female novelists from the period such as Jane Austen, the Brontë's, and George Eliot.

Jennifer Heine, University of Southern California

Dissertation: "Fits and Starts: Absent Minds and Speaking Bodies in the Victorian Novel"

Research Interests: Narrative theory, network theory, minor characters, narrative gaps

Evan Horne, Rice University

Research Interests: Neoclassicism; aesthetic philosophy; poetics; 18th and 19th-century British literature and visual art

Makayla Jenkins, Louisiana State University

Dissertation: "Ecogothic Hopefulness"

Research Interests: 19th-century women writers, Ecocriticism

Kaleigh Langston, Southern Methodist University

Research Interests: I am interested in British literature from the long nineteenth century both broadly and in relation to their interaction with home as a physical and nonphysical space. I am also interested in pedagogical approaches to teaching Victorian literature.

Skyler Marshall, UC Santa Cruz

Research Interests: My work considers the state of the humanities as an academic discipline in universities in the 21st century by studying Virginia Woolf as a critic, writer, and reader in the previous century. I am focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare appears in her writings as a critic specifically outside of and excluded from the academy.

Lindsey McClure, Southern Methodist University

Dissertation: "'Remembered Fragments': Layers of Cultural Authority in Irish Texts, 1845-1916

Research Interests: As a scholar, I am primarily interested in 19th-century British and Irish literature, especially culture, the Gothic, and folklore and fairy tale influences. I am working on a dissertation that examines sources of cultural authority in 19th—and early 20th-century Irish literature and positions canonical texts alongside nontraditional literary materials to broaden our understanding of what is and can be “literature.”

Lara Lee Meintjes, UC Berkeley

Research Interests: My current research explores the sociability of lyric poetry and the intersection of poetry and visual art. My work typically attends to the formal mechanics of poetry and other media, seeking answers to questions of attention, immersion, and imagination. I am currently particularly interested in the lyric mode within the 19th-century novel form.

Lexi Mitchell, University of Tennessee - Knoxville

Research Interests: I found my roots in fantasy-driven stories, so it comes as no surprise that I find myself drawn to 19th-century gothic literature and speculative fiction for the fantastical and often dark and creepy elements that make up these genres as well as the ever-present concern with power and, in turn, the abuse of power that frequently drive the plots.

Carly Nations, University of Texas, Austin

Research Interests: Victorian period; dreams and visions; feminism; colonialism; intersectionality

Noah Oldfield, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Research Interests: My interests cover both the representation of non-hegemonic groups within American Western fiction as well as the representation of Jews in science fiction.

Gabriela Pires, San Francisco State University

Research Interests: I am interested in the realm of periodicals and readership, investigating the influence of serial publications on literary culture, reader engagement, and the dissemination of ideas in nineteenth-century society--particularly food, mystery novels, and the heroine.

Vesta Pitts, Stanford University

Dissertation: "The Romance Reader and the Hermeneutics of Delusion"

Research Interests: Reception theory, the history of the romance, the romance novel, the gothic romance, and the lesbian pulp novel. My dissertation traces the development of "romance" as a category through the persistent association of its readers with delusion, unreality, and untruth.

Kelsey Rall, Vanderbilt University

Dissertation: "Genres of Nineteenth-Century Single Women and the Global Anglophone World"

Research Interests: My work focuses on nineteenth-century global Anglophone literature, queer theory, and gender/sexuality studies. My current project examines how different "genres" of single women come to define community and nationhood within their nineteenth-century texts.

Sonal Rana, Rutgers University

Research Interests: Sonal Rana is a second-year PhD student in English at Rutgers University. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s in English from Ashoka University, India. She is interested in charting the impact of Henry James’ writing in the fiction of two Post-partition Indian authors, Krishna Baldev Vaid and Nirmal Verma. More broadly, her research interests include Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Literature, Post-Partition Indian Literature, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and Trauma Theory.

Maya Riles, Vanderbilt University

Research Interests: Maya Riles is a first-year doctoral student with an emphasis on literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, specializing in the Victorian Era. Her research interests include sensationalism, aestheticism, corporeality, morbidities and monsterizations, and the voyeuristic reader. Her current research questions lie in Victorian body culture, spatiality, and psychoanalysis that collectively render the body as a bizarre mass, spectacle, or apparition that inspires and reflects violence.

Corey Risinger, New York University

Dissertation: "Archival Living: Recording Self and Sensation in the Long-Eighteenth Century"

Research Interests: Corey's research lies at the intersection of archival, transnational feminist, and affect theories. She particularly attends to how nineteenth-century women strategically record and re-imagine their lives through writing and collecting. Additional interests include: embodiment, voyeurism, and feminist geography; life writing and epistolary studies; autotheory and performance studies.

Elizabeth Robertson, Louisiana State University

Research Interests: American Literature, Southern Literature, Feminist Theory, and Queer Theory

Brittany Sanders, Texas Christian University

Research Interests: I am interested in the Victorian "cult of domesticity," and portrayals of nineteenth-century female identities in crisis/transition/rebellion

Mary Shannon, UC Los Angeles

Research Interests: Nineteenth-century British literature (particularly the literature and landscapes of the English countryside); landscape & empire studies; environmental humanities; pastoral poetry; critical theory

Alexander Shassetz, UC Los Angeles

Research Interests: 19th & 20th century global anglophone literature; history of labor and technology; digital humanities

Saron Song, Sungkyunkwan University

Connor Spencer, Columbia University

Dissertation: "Queer Typology: Aesthetics, Politics, and Historical Transition in American Sexual Cultures"

Research Interests: 20th/21st-century U.S. literature and culture; the novel; queer/trans studies; history of sexuality; critical theory; aesthetics; historical materialism; realism; photography; archives; Henry James

Rachel Spencer, University of Texas, Austin

Research Interests: My research interests broadly focus on book history, Shakespeareana across the ages, theatre history/performance studies, and feminist theory.

Erin Temple, Ohio State University

Research Interests: My research is situated in (Neo)Victorian studies, adaptation studies, and narrative theory. I work on transmedia adaptations of Victorian fiction in 21st-century popular culture. 

Maggie White, University of Mississippi

Dissertation: "Fantasy Literature and the Energy Crisis"

Research Interests: Energy humanities, SFF, the Victorian imagination

Molly Young, University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests: The history of the novel, literature and philosophy, Ordinary Language Philosophy, the everyday