Graduate Student Research Interests
| Usnat Atamna, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dissertation: "Father Figures in Charles Dickens's Novels" Charles Dickens, Victorian Era, Victorian Ideal, Social Structure, Father Figures |
| Sienna Ballou, UC Santa Cruz Dissertation: "Tables, Legs, and Gestural Curves: Embodiment and the Victorian Novel" My research interests include Embodiment, Performance Studies, Dance Studies, Disability Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Victorian Literature, and Performance Studies as it relates to Literature Education. |
| Malcolm Bare, Cornell University Malcolm is a Ph.D. Student at Cornell University. His research marries theories of the novel with Information Science and Cultural Analytics. His current project traces the intersection between ethics and architecture in the long nineteenth-century novel as establishing codes for hospitality and mobility. |
| Daniela Barrera Murcia, Ryerson University Dissertation: "Canadian Multiculturalism (Mis)representations of Identity" My research interest are in contemporary Canadian literature, with special attention to literature written by persons of colour and immigrants. I am interested in the intersections between multiculturalism and identity, as well as the (mis)representations of people of colour in Canada |
| Brianna Beehler, University of Southern California Dissertation: "Dollplay: Novel Subjects in Nineteenth-Century Britain" Material culture, narratology, history of childhood, visual studies, object theory, dolls, ventriloquism |
| Rachel Cason, University of Mississippi Dissertation: "The Novel Cleric: Secularity, Individualism, and the English Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction" 19th Century British Literature, figure of the clergyman, British novels |
| T.J. Cienki, Vanderbilt University |
| Allison Clymer, University of Tennessee |
| Jeremy Culver, New York University Dissertation: "On the Construction and Commodification of Authorial Futurity in the Late Romantic Era" History of the Book, Publishing History, Identity, Celebrity, Editorial Process |
| Abraham Davila Corujo, Ohio State University I am currently interested in the phenomenon of literary celebrity culture in the nineteenth century, particularly the ways in which poets like Lord Byron constructed, consolidated, and distributed specific celebrity personas as part of the increasing commodification of poetry in a burgeoning and fast-industrializing literary marketplace. I also study the Victorian reception of the Romantics—how they accepted, rejected, or modified Romanticist ideas on art, poetry, and celebrity. |
| Rochelle Davis, University of Tennessee Victorianism, Interdisciplinary work with Art History |
| Joshua Dobbs, University of Tennessee Dissertation: "Gog, Magog, and Their Ilk: Giant Conversations About Nationhood and Identity" Victorian literature, Celtic studies, folklore |
| Abigail Droge, Stanford University Dissertation: "Reading Skills: The Politics of Literacy in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries" History of Reading, Working-Class Literacy, Victorian Novels, Literature and Science, History of Education, Pedagogy, Public Humanities, Digital Humanities |
| Kailana Durnan, Rutgers University Dissertation: "Pessimism and the British Novel of Radical Politics, 1880-1914" My work centers on the politics of the British novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My dissertation examines structures of pessimism in novelistic representations of radical politics at the turn of the twentieth century; it considers a range of mutually implicated movements for root-and-branch political transformation as they are taken up in the novels of this period, tracking the limitations of the late-Victorian and early-Edwardian radical imagination that stem from its self-defeating conflation of the dynamics of progress and decline. |
| Gayle Fallon, Louisiana State University Dissertation: "Perfecting Spaces: Difference and Deviance in Medieval Utopian Texts" Middle English literature, medieval literature, utopian literature, semiotics, Linguistics, Digital Humanities/td> |
| Hannah Fogarty, University of Buffalo Dissertation: "Tactile Values: Touch in Victorian Literature and Psychology" My research interests include the history of science, medicine, and psychology, and questions of sensation and embodiment. My dissertation considers the ways in which, for Victorian authors and psychologists, touch opened up questions about the location and status of subjectivity and consciousness, emphasizing the openness of the body and the self to objects, others, and the environment. |
| Imogen Forbes-Macphail, UC Berkeley My research focuses on the relationship between literature and mathematics in the nineteenth century, with a particular concentration on Victorian poetry. Figures of interest include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Barnes, James Joseph Sylvester, Ada Lovelace, and William Rowan Hamilton. At the moment, I am working on ideas of form in relation to projective geometry and topology. |
| Christian Gallichio, University of Georgia Popular Nineteenth Century Fiction, Holiday Fiction, Gift Theory, Transatlantic Studies |
| Raelynn Gosse, University of Texas, Austin My research interests include women’s writing, feminist theory, and visual art in connection to 18th- and 19th- century British literature and cultural studies. I am particularly interested in sensation fiction, explorations of the Gothic and the evolution of horror, and depictions of the supernatural. My current projects concern representations of transgressive female bodies, witchcraft, and mythological creatures in contemporary film and Victorian literature. |
| Kirsten Hall, University of Texas, Austin My research focuses on eighteenth-century attitudes towards the classical world, especially in the areas of literature, ethics, and religion. I'm particularly interested in Samuel Johnson and novelists in the latter half of the century, including Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith. |
| Kristen Hanley Cardozo, UC Davis Dissertation: "Brutes: Animality in the British Long Nineteenth Century" Animality, law, race, gender, disability, the novel |
| Laura Hayes, University of Iowa Dissertation: "The Body Composed: Movement and Media in Victorian Literature" 19th-Century British Literature, Body Studies, Narratology |
| Amit Kardush, University of Haifa Dissertation: "A Song of Subversion: The Fantastic Female in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire" I am interested in modern fantasy literature, gender representations and how the two interact, as well as chronotopian representations in modern fatnasy and Science Fiction |
| Hadia Khan, Ryerson University Dissertation: "EFL: English as a First Language in Post-Colonial Asia" There is a high demand for English teaching in Asia. My research examines how colonization has impacted Asia, and what it means for many Asian countries to want English as their first (if not second) language. I'm interested in looking at the effects of colonization on the development of language, cultural identity and the need to 'westernize' post-colonial Asia (i.e. South Asian). |
| Lucy Kim, Vanderbilt University 19th-century British literature and culture, theories of the novel, feminist theory, economic history |
| Kelsey Kiser, Southern Methodist University Dissertation: "Secret Selves: Surveillance and Twentieth-Century African American Literature" 19th and 20th century American Literature, African American Literature, Surveillance Studies, American Studies |
| Gabriela Kustner, University of Haifa Dissertation: "'What ought I to do?': Constructing a Conscience in George Eliot’s Novels" Victorian literature, George Eliot, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, moral philosophy, character study |
| Hannah Landes, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dissertation: "The Disnarrated Without Borders" My theoretical interest is in the field of narratology. I am researching disnarration (i.e. hypothetical events suggested by the characters or by the narrator) in Victorian and early modern fiction. Novels that I will be examining include David Copperfield and Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and The Aspern Papers by Henry James. |
| Ji Eun Lee, UC Los Angeles Dissertation: "London-Walking and the Dissolution of English National Character in the British Novel, 1840-1910" 19th-Century British Literature; Narrative & the Novel; Posthumanisms; Urban Humanities; Postcolonial Studies |
| Amani Liggett, UC Santa Cruz I am interested in researching the American relationship with Shakespeare's works as an emblem of British culture. |
| Austin Lim, San Francisco State University I am interested in animal studies, the history of economics, and queer theory. |
| Phillip Lobo, University of Southern California Dissertation: "Alternative Realisms: Subjectivity in Novels and Games" Novel studies, game studies, realism, subjectivity, formalism, history, systems, procedural rhetoric |
| Meredith McCullough, Rice University The oceanic; poetry of the long nineteenth-century (especially by women); feminism; ecocriticism. |
| Riley McGuire, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation: "The Novel as Vocal Technology: Inscribing Dysfluency and Identity in the Long Nineteenth Century" The voice; the nineteenth-century novel; dysfluency; disability studies; queer theory; sound studies; media studies |
| Alexie McPherson, University of Georgia Dissertation: "Evil Born With All Its Teeth: The Cretan Women in the Victorian Imagination" Victorian literature, nineteenth-century classical reception, myth and folklore, temporality |
| Randi Mihajlovic, Rice University Women's writing; gender and sexuality studies; periodicals; Victorian popular culture |
| Diana Newby, Columbia University Victorian literature; British modernism; ecofeminism and the new materialisms; 19th and 20th century metaphysics; theories of trauma and suffering. |
| Allison Nick, University of Mississippi My research interests include 20th Century American literature, southern female writers, postwar or mid-century literature, transatlantic studies, and feminist and queer theory. |
| Rebecca Olsen, University of Delaware Dissertation: "Creating Interior Space in the Nineteenth Century Novel" Nineteenth century British literature, Material culture, Transatlanticism, Design, Architecture, the Victorian city |
| Joan Passey, University of Exeter Dissertation: "Corpses, Coasts, and Carriages: Identifying a Cornish Gothic, 1840-1910" My interests include Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century to the present day, Victorian fiction, travel writing, and periodicals, regional fiction, landscapes, cartographies and geographies of literature, the history of science, the medical humanities, mining history, maritime history, the blue humanities, and the environmental humanities. Particularly interested in Wilkie Collins, Ann Radcliffe, Sabine Baring-Gould, the history of the railway, and subterranean literatures. |
| Bianca Perez-Cancino, Indiana University Dissertation: "Disobedient Men: Self-Governance and the Authority of the Victorian Institution" (Working Title) In my research and in my teaching, I am concerned with masculinity, authority, and representations of the Victorian family, specifically of father-son relationships. My dissertation project argues that throughout the Victorian period a shift ensued in the ways in which writers represented masculine disobedience and, more broadly, in the ways Victorians understood the relationship between disobedience and institutional authority. I trace the intertwining cultural and formal genealogy of this shift to inform our historical perspective of middle-class men’s engagement with authority, and to enrich our understanding of the formal trajectory of representations of self-governance. |
| Sarah Peterson, UC Davis Dissertation: "Dieting with the Dead: Ghostly Appetites in the Long 19th-Century" My research explores the intersections between narrative and food in the 19th century in order to better understand how dietary preference operated as a locus of identity, both individual and communal. I am particularly interested in bringing into focus the ways that the myriad food cultures found the United States during the 19th century shaped and were shaped by literary texts, specifically in their engagements with the realms of the spiritual, the supernatural, and the ghostly. |
| Rebekah Phillips, University of Delaware Victorian poetry, LGBTQ themes |
| Colette Ramuz, Royal Holloway, University of London Dissertation: "The Mouth and Oral Erotics in Dickens" My current research concerns the fetishization of the mouth in the works of Charles Dickens. Mouth fetish is associated with the nineteenth-century drive to consume and with representations of incorporation and desire. My wider research explores the centrality of the mouth in Dickensian metaphor and as a performative narrative strategy. |
| Matthew Redmond, Stanford University Dissertation: "The Extant Figure in Nineteenth-Century Literature" (Provisional Title) Living memory; last-of-kindness; lone witnesses, sole survivors, walking throwbacks; influence and intertext; literature and history. |
| Jake Romanow, Rutgers University My research centers on the relationship between narrative (and particularly narratorial) form and genre on the one hand and questions of privacy and exposure on the other. Specifically, I am interested in how third-person narrators act as gatekeepers or guides, mediating the reader's access to knowledge about characters' worlds and especially their minds, and the relationship between these methods and the debates around genre that structure much of the nineteenth-century narrative tradition. |
| Anastasia Rowan, University of Virginia Dissertation: "Reflection and Othering the Self in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates" I am mainly interested in the late Victorian period and the impact of folklore on literature, but I am also interested in the Victorian use of Medieval and Classical sources. My current project is my MA thesis, which is on Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates. |
| Cole Ryberg, Southern Methodist University 19th-century British fiction; literature and empire; sexuality in fiction; genre and the minor character. |
| Jane Shmidt, City University of New York Dissertation: "The Will to Suffer: Lovesickness in the Medical and Literary Traditions" My dissertation investigates the history of the medical paradigm of lovesickness and its belletristic representation, situating novels by Austen, Gogol, Dickens, and Turgenev in scientific discourse on afflictions of the psyche. Her research interests include 19th century literature and the emergence of psychiatry, representations of love and the bodily legibility, madness and psychosomatic illness, and psychoanalysis. |
| Miranda Steege, UC Riverside My research investigates the impact of haunting and the supernatural on subjectivity and erotic experience, focusing particularly on Spiritualism through the lens of queer theory. Additionally, I am interested in queer reading practices—ours, and the Victorians'—and where we and they locate queer sex and intimacy within various kinds of texts. |
| Daniel Stuart, University of North Texas Dissertation: "Stalking the Victorians: Predatory Surveillance in the Nineteenth-Century Novel" In addition to Dickens, my interests involved Victorian literature and culture, historical research, studies in the novel, narrative theory, and modernism. Working as a librarian, I'm also interested in digital humanities and archival preservation. |
| Konrad Swartz, University of Iowa Dissertation: "Death at a Distance: Mediating Global Romanticism" My research interests are primarily focused on the poetry, aesthetics, and political culture of the late eighteenth-century and romantic-era in Western Europe, particularly in reference to media studies and the ethics of alterity. |
| Jessica Terekhov, Princeton University Jessica's nineteenth-century interests lie particularly in book history and reading culture - with part-issued literature, as a subset of serialized texts - and in Dickensiana, of course! More broadly, and prospectively, her work considers the accessibility of intellectual culture and engages with questions of language that involve disciplinary history, theories of language, and rhetoric and prose style. In consequence, Jessica often enough finds herself dogging topics in bibliography and rare book studies, the Russian avant-garde, and eighteenth-century parody and satire. |
| Sam Tett, Indiana University Dissertation: "Paramnesiac Selves: Unbelonging at Home in Nineteenth-Century Literature" Research interests include: home; disturbances of memory; strangers; counterfactuals; strategic presentism; age theory; queer theory |
| Tara Thomas, UC Santa Cruz Dissertation: "Fin de Siècle Queer Decadent Classicism" My research interests include English aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history of sexuality, translation theory, and Greek and Roman literature. I'm currently writing about queer adaptations of imperial Roman literature in the work of Walter Pater, Michael Field, and Oscar Wilde. |
| Justin Thompson, University of Maryland Dissertation: "Women on the Lines" Victorian popular fiction; colonial and empire fiction; novel theory |
| Natalie Thompson, University of Virginia 18th and 19th century British novels, narratology, bibliography and book history. |
| Jennifer Tinonga-Valle, UC Davis Dissertation: "Patterning, Pinning, Making, Writing: Recovering Early Nineteenth-Century Women’s Literary Communities, Practices and Economies through Twenty-First-Century Craft Cultures on the Web" The novel, women writers, craft, domesticity, networks, media studies, material and visual culture, illustration, letters |
| Ellen Truxaw Bistline, UC Los Angeles Dissertation: "Realism’s Literal Illustration: How Textualized Images Explain Fictionality in the 19th-Century British Novel" I am interested in the form and history of the 19th-century British novel, book history and textual criticism, and the relationship between word and image. I am also invested in the digital humanities and the ways new media can inform and illuminate 19th-century texts. |
| Ryan Vera, City University of New York I am a first year doctoral student fascinated, perplexed, and interested in Victorian literature. My research is currently focused on "the-condition-of-England" novel and "middle-class" and "bourgeoisie" Victorian writers' portrayal of the poor, and their depiction of mill and factory towns and sanitation conditions in Victorian England. I am also interested in the [alleged] paternalism displayed by such Victorian "condition-of-England" writers. However, I am equally just as interested in "popular" Victorian novels such as Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and The Woman in White. I am wowed and enthralled by Victorian texts depicting "monstrosity" such as Bram Stoker's Dracula or Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I am, after all, also interested in gothic texts (including movies). It's also a scholarly excuse to watch horror movies and media. I am also interested in disability studies, in particular, the language of mental illness in literature and the cultural psychopathology of mental illness; the recent boom of ecocriticsm in Victorian studies; the history of the novel; and popular culture. |
| Michael Vignola, UC Los Angeles Dissertation: "The Reform Aesthetic in Late-Victorian Fiction" Political novels from roughly 1867 |
| Charlotte Wadoux, University of Kent Dissertation: The Intertextual Quest(-ion): Detection in Neo-Victorian Fictions Rewriting Dickens" Charlotte Wadoux is a PhD candidate at both the University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 and the University of Kent at Canterbury as part of a jointly supervised PhD programme (cotutelle). She currently holds a position as ATER at the University Caen Normandie. She has been awarded a scholarship from the University of Kent as well as a mobility scholarship from the Conseil Général de l’Oise. Her research bears on contemporary neo-Victorian fiction, especially on the rewriting of Charles Dickens' novels and the impact of intertextuality on reading praxis. Her dissertation argues that the modern rewritings of Dickens use the detective genre as a mode of writing but also create a particular mode of reading as the reader is asked to “play the detective.” She also looks into biofictional rewritings of Dickens in which the "Inimitable" is turned into either a detective or a criminal figure. |
| Elizabeth Wells, Louisiana State University Dissertation: "Intellectual Disability and the Literary Problem of Social Intelligence in the Long 19th Century" I am interested mainly in 19th- and early 20th-century literary explorations of illness and disability, with my specialization in literary representations of cognitive disability and difference. My dissertation examines both British and American novels that construct a relationship between the breakdown of social intelligence and the social perception of intellectual difference. Because I examine the physical constructions of intellectual disability in literary texts, I am also interested in theory and criticism on the ideological perceptions and representations of non-normative bodies in the 19th and 20th centuries. |
| Brendan Whitmarsh, University of York Dissertation: "Henry James, Queer Theory, and the Novel" Henry James, Queer Theory, Novel Theory |
| Victoria Wiet, Columbia University Dissertation: "Eccentric Conduct: Theatre and the Pleasures of Victorian Fiction" Nineteenth-century theatre; the Victorian novel; history of sexuality; narrative theory; feminist and queer theory |
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