Graduate Student Research Interests
| Kristen Andersen, University of Virginia My dissertation examines the phenomenon of slumming and cross-class disguise in Victorian literature and culture. My chapters map the spaces in which these disguises occur: servant impersonation within the domestic sphere, slumming in the East End of London, and cross-cultural masquerades in the far reaches of Empire—moving outward from home, to metropolis, to globe. |
| Mariana Badarnih, University of Haifa Cognitive phenomenology of trauma, learning, healing, and the formation of group identity in picaresque novels, lyric poetry, and in popular culture. |
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Lauren Bailey, City University of New York - Graduate Center |
| Katherine Bergevin, Columbia University Enlightenment-era political philosophy; women's writing; agriculture and enclosure; Trans-Atlantic studies; |
| Sanders Bernstein, University of Southern California My research revolves around questions of American modernism, popular culture, nationalism, and the phenomenology and epistemology of media. My dissertation project focuses on the role of media in constructing the American citizen in the early twentieth-century. |
| Marissa Bolin, University of York 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 analyse 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. |
| Katherine Brandt, San Francisco State University My areas of interest are deconstructive literary theory and Victorian studies, specifically Victorian novels. While in the past, much of my work has focused on post-structural or theoretical readings of Dickens, my current research concerns the portrayal of alcoholism and addiction as symptomatic of an overabundance of self-consciousness in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure. |
| Zoe Hope Bulaitis, University of Exeter My thesis focuses on articulating the value of the humanities within the context of contemporary higher education policy. I am fascinated in charting the rise of neoliberal approaches within British policymaking over the past thirty years. Although contemporary in its discussion of the value within the academy today, the thesis has deep roots in Victorian policy and debate. In short, my research concerns the shift from liberal to neoliberal education over the past 150 years. Exemplary expressions of liberal education found in the writings of Matthew Arnold and J.S. Mill continue to inform and inspire my research. |
| Scott Caddy, Arizona State University Jane Austen, Victorian literature, digital humanities, British women writers (18th and 19th Century), adaptation studies, 18th/19th century British and American literature in pop culture |
| Sari Carter, Vanderbilt University Nineteenth-century British nonfiction essay, experimental and epistolary or periodical genres; aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical intersections in nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to think the ungroundedness of the “moral law” and the ethics of the face-to-face interaction. |
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Rachel Cason, University of Mississippi |
| Mark Celeste, Rice University I study the textual networks built around the oceanic during the British long nineteenth-century. I am interested in how different maritime genres -- the shipwreck tale, the logbook, the sea chantey, the naval medical report, and the seafaring novel -- make visible both the influence of the oceanic and the confluence of political, historical, social, and economic networks. |
| Christine Choi, City University of New York - Graduate Center Victorian literature and culture; gender and sexuality; women's studies; and psychoanalysis. |
| Allison Clymer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville My current research focuses on the long nineteenth century’s conceptualizations of space, sensation, and the various registers of human experience. In particular, I study the ways mid-Victorian novelists used sound to explore indirect and often unsettling forms of influence. |
| Emily Cody, Ohio State University 19th-century British/Victorian literature; women's and gender studies; transatlanticism; periodicals and print culture; medical humanities; animal studies; Elizabeth Gaskell |
| Staci Conner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville My research focuses on Anglo-American Gothic literature of the long 19th-century. |
| Emily Corey, Ohio State University My dissertation project focuses on interpersonal relationships in Victorian novels, specifically relationships that replace marriage with alternative kinship or romance structures. I argue that using geometric shapes as a way to spatialize these alternative relationships can reveal the great variety of family, kinship, and partnership forms articulated in Victorian narrative texts. |
| Caitlin Crandell, Princeton University 18th- and 19th-century British fiction; materiality and the body; subjectivity; narrative form; George Eliot |
| Julie Cruz, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 19th century American literature, specifically frontier and borderland literature as it relates to nature, religion, and the travel narrative structure. |
| Danielle Dye, University of Texas, Austin My research primarily focuses on life writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries with special attention to British and Japanese literature. I am interested in how authors narrate the self through rhetorical devices and formal structures, especially when writing about periods of travel to other nations. How do authors tackle the problems of personal, cultural, and national identification through self-writing? In the past, I have written on Rudyard Kipling’s publications on his travels to Japan and Natsume Sōseki’s autobiographical and fictional accounts of his stay London. Currently, I am interested in the relationship of fiction and self-writing in the Japanese nikki bungaku (diary literature) tradition. |
| Rebecca Ehrhardt, University of Southern California I work on 18th- and 19th-century British Literature, narrative theory, and linguistic philosophy. My dissertation focuses on character and generative forms of reference in Victorian poetry and prose. |
| Emma Eisenberg, UC Berkeley I am interested in Realism, Victorian prose style, and queer theory. Lately, I have been pondering the function of humor in British intellectual culture and how to index social register in narrative voice. |
| Stephen David Engel, UC Santa Cruz My dissertation will theorize in-person communication—or dialogue—as a mode of togetherness, form of poiesis, and ground for revolutionary praxis. Other interests include violence, extinction, worldliness, and deep time. I am an interdisciplinary scholar with an emphasis in literature. |
| Noa Erez, Hebrew University of Jerusalem South African Literature during apartheid; Contemporary American Lit.; Graphic Novels; Masculinity and Gender Studies; African American Literature and Culture. |
| Venessa Febo, UC Los Angeles Historical poetics, nineteenth-century poetry, anti-slavery movements, and transatlantic literature. |
| Holly Fling, University of Georgia I study Romantic and Victorian literature, but my primary interest is the novel. In my dissertation, I trace Lewis Carroll's looking-glass into Virginia Woolf's writing, and then I use this looking-glass as a lens to read nineteenth-century women-written fiction. Reading novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot through this Woolfian looking-glass lens calls attention to how boundaries between time, space, subject and object dissolve. This dissolution, then, highlights the ways in which these nineteenth-century women writers were modernists before the male-dominated movement of modernism began. |
| Hannah Fogarty, University of Buffalo The history of medicine and psychology, sensation, the body. |
| Andrew Forrester, Southern Methodist University My primary interest is in sociability in British and American nineteenth-century literature. My dissertation looks at dinners and parties in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and argues that these occasions allowed men and women to partner together at private, social events with public aims that could either advance or impede both individual objectives and larger political, commercial, and national conditions. My secondary interests include children's literature, disability studies, and pop culture. |
| Zachary Fruit, University of Pennsylvania My research is focused on the history of the novel and the development of empire. I am interested in aesthetic theory, the history of landscape architecture, and representations of labor in the realist novel. |
| Holly Gallagher, University of Georgia Nineteenth-century British literature, Visual Culture, Visual Arts, Gender Studies, Affect Theory |
| Zachary Garber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Counterfactual narratives, the invention of history, and, more broadly, the intersection of history and fiction and its implications for nationalism and the politics of the novel. |
| Will Glovinsky, Columbia University My research focuses on 19th/early 20th-century British literature and empire studies. Additional interests include theories of the novel, modernism, and 19th-century globalization. |
| Lindsay Graham, Rice University Nineteenth-century British Literature, poetry, gender studies |
| Jessica Gray, University of Kent My thesis focuses on the representation of women working in the office, known as 'typewriter girls', in late-19th and early-20th century fiction. More broadly, my research interests include women and work, technology, gender and sexuality, and Victorian ideas of the occult. I am currently working on a chapter on the concept of 'emotional labour'. |
| Mackenzie Gregg, UC Riverside My research considers Victorian aesthetics through the concept of touch and the tactile. |
| Amy Hale, Dominican University of California |
| Katherine Harclerode, Southern Methodist University 19th-Century Transatlantic, Book History, Collective Biography |
| Michael Hatch, Arizona State University My research interests include 19th Century British Literature, Narrative Theory, and Detective Fiction. |
| Sean Hughes, Rutgers University I'm interested in the changing ways that Victorian authors used remarkable individuals as representative figures. I'm also interested in poetics and, occasionally, philosophy. |
| Cherrie Kwok, New York University British and anglophone literature; decadent poetry; Victorian cosmopolitanisms. |
| Linda Liu, Stanford University My dissertation focuses on the development of conservatism as a modern ideology in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the narrative forms through which antebellum American novels inscribe early, complex responses to the counter-democratic limitations it proposes. More generally, I'm interested in politics, ethics, and the novel, transatlantic literary and intellectual exchange, critical reading practices, and narrative theory. |
| Lydia Maunz-Breese, University of Iowa I study nineteenth-century British literature and disability studies. My current interests include several disparate topics: Victorian poetry, geology, grief and mourning, and “undocumented disabilities.” I’m exploring various poetic representations of geological memory and the use of metaphor to represent other kinds of memory, time, and age. I’m particularly intrigued by texts that depict the earth as deformed, debilitated, or disabled and how those constructs interact with Victorian ideas about the disabled and disability. |
| Margaret Miller, UC Davis 18th- and 19th-century domesticity, constructions of kinship and the family; Victorian science and ecologies; queer theory and queer historiography; and temporality studies, particularly constructions of Deep Time as a potential site of queer-feminist-multispecies historicity |
| Veronica Mittnacht, UC Berkeley I work on questions of agency, determinism, and individuality in 19th-century novels. |
| Frances Molyneux, Stanford University Maritime Literature; Literary Geography and Spatiality; The Maritime Gothic; Nineteenth-century travel literature; The emergence of Modernism |
| Samantha Nystrom, University of Delaware My research centers on the construction of the British garden during the long nineteenth century, both in its material and textual form. In this work I draw from ecocritical and material culture theories. In doing so, I often consider how the construction of the garden parallels the construction of identity—both at local and global levels. |
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Rosalind Parry, Columbia University |
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Annemarie Pearson, University of Iowa |
| Leah Duncan Powell, Louisiana State University I am currently studying 19th-century southern literature, American naturalism, and print culture in preparation for exams. I am particularly interested in the influence of journalism on 19th-century American novels and novelists, and in the way 19th-century serialized novels reveal awareness of themselves as print objects. |
| Crescent Rainwater, UC Los Angeles Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature, British aestheticism and decadence, the history and development of the novel, English women novelists of the fin-de-siècle, Oscar Wilde and his circle. |
| Max Sater, Rutgers University My research focuses on Victorian literature, narrative theory, and the history of science. |
| Sierra Senzaki, University of Texas, Austin I study the British Modernist novel, ecocriticism, new materialism, and the relationship between fin-de-siècle science and literature. My most recent work examines moments of interaction between human and nonhuman nature in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” and To the Lighthouse through a posthumanist and new materialist critical lens. I also have a vast array of secondary interests, including the Victorian novel, women’s writing, colonialism and imperialism, and the Gothic. |
| Yumi Shiroma, Rutgers University I study the intersections between Marxist metanarratives of the novel, book history, and computational text analysis, focusing on 18th and 19th century British texts. |
| Tsila Sofer Elguez, University of Haifa Death as a narrative device in the Victorian novel |
| Anna Stone, University of Kentucky Modern and Victorian Irish literature, 20th century British poetry, the Big House novel |
| Sarah Storti, University of Virginia Long nineteenth-century, poetry and poetics, book history, textual studies, literary annuals, and nineteenth-century publishing |
| Elisabeth Strayer, Cornell University 19th-century British literature, world literature, ecocriticism, visual culture, history of photography |
| Sam Tett, Indiana University, Bloomington My research explores qualities of strangeness (strangers, "aliens," haunted houses...) that constitute the everyday. As such, I work not only with the Victorian gothic, but also with texts that foreground the quotidian. My dissertation, "Away at Home: Uncanny Unbelonging in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel," explores representations of alienation in spaces of ostensible belonging (or "homes"). |
| Tara Thomas, UC Santa Cruz Victorian classical reception, decadence and aestheticism, queer studies, and Latin literature. |
| Rebecca Thursten, New York University Mid 19th- to mid 20th-century British and American literature; objects and material culture; U.S. multi-ethnic literature; gender and sexuality; mental health and medicine. |
| Jennifer Tinonga-Valle, UC Davis Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century British Literature; Women Writers; Craft and Material Culture; Media Studies |
| Eliza Urban, Louisiana State University Victorian literature and drama, phenomenology and affect theory, theatre production history, adaptation studies |
| Polina Vinogradova, Ryerson University My research interests include Victorian literature and culture; sound studies; Marxism; literature and science; the digital humanities; and German media theory. |
| Darby Walters, University of Southern California I am interested in the ways that fictional narrative structures refract and inform medical narratives in the nineteenth-century. |
| Rosalind White, Royal Holloway, University of London My research project charts an intimate, personal exploration of natural history that examines the lives of its practitioners beyond the impact of conventional watersheds. I will outline how the natural history that captivated the Victorians was a personal, evocative, aesthetic science, a science that did not look at objects of nature purely to understand them but a discourse that revels in the beauty, multiplicity and mystery of nature. My project will be underpinned by detailed close readings of George Eliot’s texts in an interdisciplinary study towards an evolving understanding of the historiography of science. I am particularly interested in digital humanities, questions of materiality, the growing field of research on the history of emotions, and the connection between art and science. |
| Lucy Whitehead, University of Exeter and Cardiff University My dissertation will be the first detailed full-length study of the genesis and evolution of Dickens biographies, from the foundational account by his close friend and appointed biographer John Forster, to the flourishing of biographical activity around his bicentenary in 2012, and after. In addition to Dickens, and life-writing, my research interests also include: Victorian material and visual culture; Victorian classical reception; masculinities; the history of sexuality; late Victorian into modern; Henry James; transatlanticism; Charlotte Brontë. |
| Ted Zhang, Ryerson University Canadian/Diasporic Literature; Victorian Novels (Eliot/Charlotte Brontë) |
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