Contributors
Shuhita Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor of English Literature in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Having completed her PhD at the University of Iowa, she is working on a monograph about fin-de-siècle representations of colonial idols (Routledge USA), and on another monograph on Postsecular Theory (Orient Blackswan). She has published on Victorian literature and culture and on diaspora in English Literature in Transition and with Palgrave Macmillan, Edinburgh University Press, and Lexington Books. She has also worked extensively in the social sector at national and international levels in areas including sex education, gendered HIV-related violence, and sexual harassment.
Anna Brecke is a Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work can be seen in The Victorian, VIJ Digital Annex, and Media Report to Women. Her research focuses on gender in popular fiction and media from the nineteenth century to the present day. She is one of the reviews editors of the VPFJ.
James Hamby is the Associate Director of the Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University and the Book Reviews Associate Editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. His dissertation, David Copperfield: Victorian Hero considers David Copperfield as a new archetypal hero for the Victorian Age.
Andrew Hewitt is a part-time PhD student at the University of Hull working on Thomas Hardy and affect. His paper “The Castaways of Egdon Heath: The Return of the Native as Island Narrative” (Thomas Hardy Journal, 2014) considers the role of Hardy’s map of Egdon Heath as a guide to the themes of his novel. Hewitt has also published on Hardy and Conrad (FATHOM, 2019) and presented papers at conferences and study days on Hardy, poetry and faith, and Hardy and Defoe.
Michael Horton is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and English Literature PhD student at Edge Hill University. His doctoral thesis is a multi-disciplinary exploration on press representations of monsters and other preternatural subjects in nineteenth-century journalism. He presented a paper titled “Here Be Dragons: Exploring the Monstrous, Weird and Fantastic in Victorian journalism” at the British Association for Victorian Studies Conference in 2019.
Mara Mattoscio is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the “Gabriele d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). She is the author of Corpi affetti. Il Sudafrica di Nadine Gordimer dalla pagina allo schermo (2018) and of several essays on Anglophone postcolonial literature and film, with a special focus on South African writing in a comparative perspective.
Rebecca Nesvet, Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, has contributed research on James Malcolm Rymer to Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Network, Notes and Queries, and Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. Nesvet’s research on other topics appears in The Keats–Shelley Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and Women’s Writing, as well as anthologies including Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses” (Liverpool University Press, 2018), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2017). In 2012, Nesvet won the Lore Metzger essay prize at the International Conference on Romanticism.
Sophie Raine began her PhD at Lancaster University following the completion of her MA at the University of Sunderland in 2015. Her research explores Victorian popular fiction, specifically how the penny dreadful’s narratives were radical social commentaries that engaged and interacted both with each other and the press. In addition to her research, Raine has co-organised the “Back to the Future: Class and the Past” conference (2016) and the “Gothic Spectacle and Spectatorship” (2019) conference at Lancaster University. She is currently a postgraduate representative for the George W. M. Reynolds Society.
Samuel Saunders received his PhD in English from Liverpool John Moores University in 2018, and is currently a Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at University Centre Shrewsbury, University of Chester. His first monograph, The Victorian Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction, is contracted for publication with Routledge in 2021. Saunders is also co-editor for the upcoming collection The Detective’s Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks (2021) and has previously written for Law, Crime and History, the Wilkie Collins Journal, and the Open Library of Humanities. He has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Popular Culture.
Elizabeth Sheckler is based at the University of New Hampshire. Her dissertation focused on medical spaces and gender in the Victorian novel, especially hospitals. Her research interests include gender, architecture, space and power, and the medical humanities.
Tabitha Sparks is an Associate Professor of English (Nineteenth-Century British Novel) at McGill University, where she is also the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts. Her current work focuses on the social relationships embedded in novel form, particularly in works by women writers. Past publications include The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (2009), Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture, co-edited with Louise Penner (2015), a Broadview edition of Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl (2017), and numerous articles and book chapters.
Luisa Villa is Professor of English literature at the University of Genova, Italy. She has published books in Italian on Henry James (1989), George Eliot (1994), ressentiment in late-nineteenth-century fiction (1997), and on the representation of the British military campaigns in the Sudan (“For Honour, not Honours,” 2009). Some of her papers – on James and Ruskin, Gissing, the fin de siècle Schopenhauerian vogue, Stevenson, Kipling, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – have been included in collections published by Palgrave, Rodopi, Peter Lang, Equilibris, and the University of Wisconsin Press, and in the Journal of Victorian Culture.
Minna Vuohelainen is Senior Lecturer in English at City, University of London. Her current research focuses on fin-de-siècle print culture, genre (particularly Gothic and crime fiction), London literatures and spatial theory, and Thomas Hardy. Her publications include the monograph Richard Marsh (2015), the coedited essay collections Interpreting Primo Levi: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2015, with Arthur Chapman) and Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890–1915: Rereading the Fin de Siècle (2018, with Victoria Margree and Daniel Orrells), and a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on the Strand Magazine, co-edited with Emma Liggins (2019).
Tamara S. Wagner is Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (2020), Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009), as well as several special issues.
Claire Whitehead is Reader in Russian at the University of St Andrews and is an expert on Russian crime fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day. She is the author of the monograph The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection (Legenda, 2018) as well as numerous other articles on the subject. She has written extensively on various authors of nineteenth-century Russian crime fiction, as well as on the contemporary author, Boris Akunin.