Contributors
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott is a PhD researcher at the University of Portsmouth studying the autobiographies of nineteenth-century magicians and representations of conjuring in Victorian literature. She co-organised ‘Supernatural Cities IV’ and ‘Breaking Bounds’ in 2019 and recently completed a research placement contextualizing nineteenth-century playbills and periodical reviews at the British Library.
Emily Bell is Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Loughborough University. She has published on Dickens, Collins and life writing, as well as on the history of digitised nineteenth-century newspapers. She is editing Dickens’s later short fiction for the Oxford Dickens series, and is an editor for the Dickens Letters Project. Her recent edited collection, Dickens After Dickens, has recently been published by White Rose UP.
Vicki Callanan received her PhD from Canterbury Christ Church University in 2018. Her research focuses on gender in literature within the publishing and secretarial spheres, focussing specifically on letterpress printing and compositing. She is a letterpress printer and collector and teaches Literature and Linguistics in Canterbury, Kent, UK.
Mariaconcetta Costantini is Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University, Italy. Her research mainly focuses on Victorian literature and culture, with a special interest in sensation fiction and the Gothic. She is the author of six books, numerous articles and book chapters. Her latest publication is the volume Mrs Henry Wood (2020). She co-edits VPFJ.
Helena Esser is completing her PhD on how steampunk fiction re-purposes shared urban imaginaries of Victorian London at Birkbeck College, London. She has published on London, post-humanism, and the cyber-city in steampunk, and on Gothic urbanisms in the neo-Victorian adaptation Ripper Street. She is a fan of Ouida.
Barbara D. Ferguson is a PhD candidate in nineteenth-century British Literature at McMaster University, Canada. Her dissertation examines the era’s mass media presentations of science and spiritualist investigation as each sought to demarcate what constituted “legitimate” knowledge and practice and how the ensuing conversations influenced Victorian fiction.
Dominique Gracia is the UK Administrative Director of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Central Online Victorian Educator (NAVSA COVE) project. Her research focuses on Victorian poetry and short fiction, media history, and the reuse of Victorian themes and tropes in contemporary television media.Forthcoming publications include a chapter on the legacy of Sherlock Holmes stories and an article on Michael Field (in Victorian Poetry).
Graziella Stringos is a Senior Lecturer within the University of Malta, Junior College. Her research area includes Victorian and early twentieth-century literature, particularly the works of popular women writers, as well as Neo-Victorian fiction. She is currently working on a collaborative project entitled Masculinity under Scrutiny: Women Writing Men in Victorian Popular Fiction.
Saverio Tomaiuolo is Associate Professor at Cassino University, Italy. He has published In Lady Audley’s Shadow. Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Victorian Unfinished Novels. The Imperfect Page (Palgrave, 2012), alongside a contribution on the sensation novel and the Indian Mutiny in the Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (ed. Andrew Mangham, 2013). More recently, he has written a critical introduction to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. His entry on neo-Victorianism is included in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. His latest book is entitled Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Transgression, Canon, Innovation (Palgrave, 2018). He is currently working on a new project on the Italian screen adaptations of Victorian novels.
Francesca Vinci gained her BA (Hons) in English Literature and American Studies at the University of Gloucestershire and her MA in Comparative Literature at KCL. Her MA dissertation focused on the process of deconstruction and reconstruction in Primo Levi’s and Etty Hillesum’s writings of the Holocaust. Recently her review on the translation of J. Conrad’s Amy Foster by Tania Zulli has been published by the Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, Edizioni Solfanelli.
Tobias Wilson-Bates is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College. His work examines novels as participating both conceptually and materially in the techno-cultural discourses that shaped the nineteenth century. At the centre of his work is the concept of the “time machine,” an idea he reads as emerging from the combination of narrative modes with assumptions of scientific and technological objectivity. His book project, Time and its Machine, traces this idea from early-century thinkers like Mary Shelley and Charles Babbage to the mass implementation of standard time and universal education that made possible Wellsian time travel.