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Graduate Student Research Interests

Graduate student names, universities, dissertation titles, and research interests
Jai Apate, UC Davis
Spencer Armada, UC Santa Cruz
Emily Beckwith, University of Georgia Research Interests: Victorian literature and culture; the novel; women writers; representations of women and gender; adaptations of nineteenth-century literature (especially YouTube web series). Other Interests: Romantic era literature and culture; nineteenth-century British periodical studies; literature and the environment.
Anna Blanch, University of New England (Armidale) Dissertation: "'Inasmuch As Ye Did It Not...': A Study in the spiritual imagination of E.Nesbit (1858-1924)" Research Interests: The role of women in the development of nineteenth-century fantasy and supernatural fiction; the common grammar of biblical imagery in late Victorian novels; the role of reading in moral education; Law and Literature and Law as literature (including plain English legal writing) in the context of access to justice.
Leslie Brownlee, UC Davis
Jordan Bunzel, Indiana University Dissertation: "Learning through the Body: Experimental Educations in the School Novel" Research Interests: Victorian and modern pedagogy, the school novel, queer Bildungsromane, affect theory, and embodiment more broadly. I am currently writing a dissertation on English school fictions and what they reveal about the nineteenth-century’s experiments with bodily forms of education: namely, with affective learning, optical development, as well as the period’s (rather controversial) endorsements and ethical anxieties about instrumentalizing sexual abuse and weapon violence in classrooms. I am also interested in distinctions between the classically heteronormative Bildungsromane and the queer coming-of-age stories often set in schoolhouses.
Jessica Cook, UC Los Angeles Dissertation: "The Boundaries of Memory: Aberrant Remembering in Nineteenth-Century Literature from Déjà Vu to Ancestral Recall" Research Interests: Located at the intersection of literary formalism and philosophy of mind, my dissertation examines strange memory experiences in Victorian novels, poems, and dramas. I am currently working on a chapter on narrative retrospection and déjà vu in David Copperfield. More broadly, other topics of interest include the history of science, philosophy of science and consciousness, Romantic radical politics, and representations of London.
Shannon Couey, University of North Texas Dissertation: "Sonic Speculation: Bodies, Minds, and Technologies in Science Fiction, 1876-1926" Research Interests: My research explores turn of the century, transatlantic science fiction and the role of sensory perception and sensory experience. Specifically, I examine the embodied experience of sounds, noise, and music and the ways in which science fiction acts as a critically generative site for new conceptions of non-normative, subversive embodied identities including gender, race, and class. I often draw from, and am interested in, sound studies, science fiction criticism, affect theory, gender studies, and the history of science.
Elizabeth Crawford, UC Los Angeles
Steele Douris, Stanford University
Angel Dye, Rutgers University Research Interests: 20th and 21st century African American Literature (Harlem Renaissance, contemporary fiction, poetry), African American Studies, History, Gender & Women's Studies
Annemarie Ewing, University of Maryland Dissertation: "Constructing Citizenship: Redress and the Counterfactual in Reconstruction Literature" Research Interests: My research focuses on 19th century American literature, with an emphasis on race, citizenship, and Reconstruction.
Charlotte Fiehn, University of Texas, Austin Dissertation: "Experimental Forms in the Works of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf" Research Interests: My dissertation explores issues of form and gender in the writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. I am a specialist in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and American literature.
Emily Foster, Columbia University Dissertation: "'Even supposing...': the unfinished Victorian Novel" Research Interests: I study the 19th-century novel, and have a long-held fascination for the Gothic, as well as a more newly-acquired interest in the unfinished work.
Grace Franklin, University of Southern California Research Interests: I study primarily nineteenth-century British literature and culture, though I have written on works by Margaret Fuller and other transatlantic figures. My research interests include temporality (within the novel and in a broader historical and geological sense) and the interrelation of emergent Victorian technologies and aesthetic production, as well as health and embodiment. More broadly, I work at the intersection of narrative theory, digital humanities, and aesthetics, with a recurrent interest scientific history and literature. The environmental humanities shape much of my thinking.
Emma Hetrick, University of Texas, Austin Research Interests: I work on the reprinting of English literature in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on modified American editions of English novels. I'm interested in conceptions of national identity, transatlantic print culture, and the digital humanities.
Lilach Karsenty, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dissertation: "The Development of the Concept of the Female Orphan as a Redeeming Figure in English Literature" Research Interests: My research investigates the concept of the female orphan as a redeeming figure, in four main texts: Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Eleanor E. Porter’s Pollyanna (1913) and J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé - with Love and Squalor” (1950). In my research, I look at the female orphan’s moral role in influencing the adults around her and examine the tension between redemption and self-sacrifice from literary, ethical and historical perspectives.
Kirsten Lee, University of Pennsylvania
Christian Lewis, The Graduate Center, CUNY Dissertation: "Narrative Side-Stepping: Queering/Cripping (Im)mobility in Victorian Fiction" Research Interests: Intersections of disability/gender/sexuality in Victorian fiction; performance studies/theatre/dramatic literature; medical humanities; sensation fiction and the Gothic
Conor MacVarish, Columbia University
Alice Martin, Rutgers University Research Interests: My research interests include nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture, sentimentality/domesticity, childhood studies, and writing studies. I love working with women/children's everyday or domestic documents in the archive and discussing creative and expository writing practices/processes with students.
Maddison McGann, University of Iowa
Trevor McMichael, Indiana University
Alexander Millen, University of Pennsylvania
Dana Mitchell, Ryerson University 18th- and 19th-Century literature, Romanticism, ecocriticism, and autobiographical fiction
Frances Molyneux, Stanford University Dissertation: "Disjunct Motion: Sound's Effects in the Nineteenth-Century Novel" Research Interests: My research explores the importance of seemingly minor, non-linguistic sounds (knocks, bells, whistles, coughs, and the like) in nineteenth-century British novels and novellas, ranging from Charlotte Brontë to Joseph Conrad. My primary interests include affect theory, oceanic studies, transatlantic studies, and sound studies.
Bailey Moorhead, University of Mississippi
Lacey Muckle, Rutgers University Research Interests: Transatlantic Literature; 19th C Novel; Gender & Sexuality studies; Narrative.
Avital Nemzer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Research Interests: My research interests range from Romantic poetry to modernist and postmodernist prose fiction, principally concerning the representation of nature, cyclicality, nostalgia, and human-nonhuman relations. Of particular interest to me is the patterning of trees in Vladimir Nabokov’s work, and specifically its interface with questions of memory, loss, and the implicit presence of the departed in his writing. I find Dickens’s work intriguing, particularly for its multivalent treatment of the contrast between urban and natural environments.
Kaari Newman, University of Delaware Research Interests: 19th-century periodical studies, transatlantic women's print, and material culture, Victorian short fiction and serial fiction
Rachel Newman, University of Southern California Research Interests: I am interested in the 19th-century novel and the history, socio-political, and cultural background of the novel, with a particular focus in different periodizations of Victorian novels written by women, including the realist novel, the marriage plot, the 'Condition of England' and social problem novel, and the sensation novel. I am interested in how female authors write female characters within these different plots and trouble their boundaries. I have recently done work on female vocation and the marriage plot in the novels of George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and the Brontë sisters, the fallen woman in novels by Charles Dickens, and the relationship between melodrama and sensation in the novels of M.E. Braddon. On the theoretical side, I have interests in narrative theory and theories of the novel, feminist theory, and recently, ecocriticism.
Fyza Parviz, Stanford University Dissertation: "Medici Oriental Press and the dissemination of Arabic scientific works" Research Interests: My research deals mainly with the circulation of scientific texts and cultural relations between Europe and the Islamicate world during the 16th century. I explore the establishment of oriental printing presses in Europe. For example, Typographia Medicea was set up in Rome in 1584 and published scientific works of Arab scholars such as Aviceena and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.
Sarah Pennington, Ryerson University Research Interests: Victorian literature, with a focus on Christina Rossetti as well as early detective fiction writers like Wilkie Collins. Interested in digital humanities, particularly the Christina Rossetti in Music Project, and the Y90s 2.0 periodical project.
Lauren Peterson, UC Davis
Josh Prindle, UC Riverside
Maddie Reynolds, Cornell University Dissertation: "Anthropomorphic Representations: Blurring Animal-Human Boundaries in the Nineteenth-Century Novel" Research Interests: I work on nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on the novel. My dissertation discusses how Victorian novels define the "human," looking closely at animal representations in the context of Darwinian evolution, the rise of biological sciences, and British colonialism. I am particularly interested in animal studies, ecocriticism, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial theory.
Corey Risinger, New York University Research Interests: Gender & Sexuality Studies, Feminism(s), Narrative Authority. My research tracks the (self)representation of women writers (particularly working women) in the 18th and 19th centuries — and it's recently been profoundly influenced by "embodied geography," voyeurism, feminist geography, the female gaze.
Melissa Rogers, University of Southern California Research Interests: My work approaches nineteenth-century literature through gender and sexuality studies, using both a critical and creative mode to explore affect, female embodiment, and queer interiority/imagination. This work is informed by my background in French literature and interest in the intersecting genres of autofiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction.
Cole Ryberg, Southern Methodist University Research Interests: 19th-century literature, the novel and theories of the novel, minor characters, science fiction, genre, utopian literature, humor and satire.
Michelle Sherwin, University of Georgia Dissertation: "American Women and Mentorship" Research Interests: Nineteenth and twentieth-century American and African American literature, with an emphasis on the intersections of race and gender. The role(s) of women mentoring women. Other interests include motherhood, particularly "mothers who murder," popular culture theory and representations of race in television.
Abigail Struhl, UC Berkeley Research Interests: Realism and mimesis; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels and novel theory; visual culture.
Tara Thomas, UC Santa Cruz Dissertation: "Late-Victorian Queer Decadent Classicism" Research Interests: My dissertation examines how late-Victorian authors revived queer Roman literary history to prefigure their dissent from predominant gender-sex paradigms. It thus explores how nineteenth-century authors forged a genealogy from Roman literary figures and imagined a queer aesthetic history. I'm interested in Victorian studies, Greek and Roman classics, queer and feminist theories, archival studies, & translation and adaptation studies.
Justin Thompson, University of Maryland
Zac Thriffiley, Southern Methodist University Research Interests: 20th/21st century American literature, expressions of nationalism and ethnonationalism after 1945
Krithika Vachali, Cornell University Dissertation: "Novel Relations: Collection Epistemologies in the Nineteenth-Century British Literature" Research Interests: I work on collecting, collecting practices and collection epistemologies in the long nineteenth century in Britain, particularly as they manifest in and interact with narrative. I also focus on natural history and empire in the nineteenth century, especially as it intersects with collections writ large and British novel.
Mitchell Wilson, The Graduate Center, CUNY Research Interests: My research is mainly on the Victorian novel in a broad sense, but as of late I have been thinking a lot about the intersection of provincialism and empire studies. In my recent coursework, I have taken on the project of interrogating the relationship between those two areas of study and thinking through the question of how serialization and colonial literatures may complicate the province/metropole binary.
Wendy Wood, University of Houston Dissertation: "Man, Monkey, or Machine: Nineteenth-Century Scientific Advancements Lead to a New Understanding of Human" Research Interests: Long nineteenth century, Gothic Literature, Science fiction and fantasy, the History of the Book
Rudi Yniguez, UC Berkeley Research Interests: I'm interested in exploring the Novel as a space for continual recreation and maintenance of the Commons and the narratorial office's potential for composing and transfiguring sovereignty.