Contributors
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Haley Carpenter trained at Barbizon and played roles in numerous radio plays aired on Tales from the Penny Bloods, including The Flying Dutchman and The One-Handed Lady. Even through all the characters she portrays, she always remembers to stay true to herself.
Emma Catan (they/them) is a PhD candidate at Northumbria University, researching cross-dressing and ‘transgression’ in neo-Victorian literary spaces. Their research interests include Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, crime narratives, gender and sexuality, and city spaces.
Toni Deaver has been acting/singing and doing VO since grade school, when she was chosen to voice six characters in a Bozo the Clown spin off. Continuing to act in film and theater, Toni also works as a humanitarian and speaker on behalf of the working homeless and mentally challenged.
Atele Dutt is an Assistant Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the South Pacific. An historian by training, her research to-date has focused on gender-inequalities and the lingering legacies of colonialism in the 21st century Pacific. She is a native Samoan speaker and translator.
Helena Esser holds a PhD from Birkbeck, London, and is a literary scholar working and publishing on steampunk, neo-Victorian, and Victorian popular fiction. Her monographs on Steampunk London (Bloomsbury) and Ouida (Edward Everett Root) were published in 2024. Her work on steampunk London, cyborgs, and video games, neo-Victorian adaptation, or Meiji Japan has been published, among others, in Humanities, Neo-Victorian Studies and Victorian Popular Fictions. She co-organises the VPFA reading group on ‘The Third Sex’.
Amanda Farage received her PhD in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and has previously worked as Assistant Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. She is currently working on a book manuscript based upon the ways in which Victorian anxieties about captivated reading, mechanical reading, and the proliferation of print material can be traced to twenty-first century trepidations about the ubiquity of textual and digital media and their consumption. Her chapter, “‘A strange fascination’: Oscar Wilde, the Dangers of Captivated Reading, and 21st Century Media Consumption” can be found in Salem Press’ Critical Insights: Oscar Wilde, and two of her essays on Alice Meynell and her writing are included in Palgrave Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing.
Taryn Hakala is Assistant Professor of English at California State University Channel Islands. Her work has been published in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Philological Quarterly, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Studies. She is currently finishing her first book, Dialect Acts: Identity Performance on the Victorian Page and Stage.
Erica Haugtvedt is Associate Professor of English in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Department at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Her work has been published in journals including Transformative Works and Cultures, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Victorian Studies. Her book, Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Nineteenth Century came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2022.
Helena Ifill is a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen where she is Co-Director of the Centre for the Novel. Her research interests include sensation fiction, the Gothic, the popular press and literary engagements with science and medicine. Her monograph, Creating Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction was released in 2018. She is on the Executive Committee of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, Co-Editor of Victorian Popular Fictions and Co-Series Editor of the monograph series Key Popular Women Writers.
Vianna Iorio is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers University. She studies nineteenth century British literature and culture, with interests in melodrama, adaptation, and women’s writing across genres, as well as issues of conventionality, popularity, and spectatorship broadly. She is completing a dissertation on Victorian spectatorship, erotics, and gender.
Raymond Mahnke is an audio engineer and editor for Tales from the Penny Bloods Podcast. He has a Master of Arts degree in English and an Associate of Science degree in Computer Science. When not editing, Raymond enjoys working as a referee for independent professional wrestling and watching films.
Helen McKenzie is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at the Open University and Secretary of the VPFA. Her research focuses on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, authorship, popular fiction, the New Woman, and the Victorian periodical press. Her work has appeared in Victorian Popular Fictions.
Clive Marlowe has worked in UK theatre for over 45 years; West End work includes Fiddler On The Roof, The Woman In Black, The Hobbit and more recently The Mousetrap, where he has understudied for a number of years. His national and international touring resume includes South Pacific, The Sound of Music and Harvey.
Dean Allen Medek is a stage and film actor performing roles like Prospero in The Tempest, George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, and Lester Goodell in Brown vs. Board of Education. Film projects include Professor Higgins in “Checkmate,” Mr. Isaac in “I Rise” (Amazon Prime), and The Man in “Giggin.”
Rebecca Nesvet is Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her book, James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family (2024) is recently published by Routledge. Nesvet has published in journals including Nineteenth Century Studies, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, Victorian Network, Notes and Queries, and Women’s Writing. Nesvet edited James Malcolm Rymer’s penny dreadful A Mystery in Scarlet for COVE Editions and is co-editing Robert Southey’s unpublished Gothic novel Harold, or, the Castle of Morford (1791) for Routledge. Nesvet is also a Technical Editor and Pedagogy Consultant at the COVE Collective.
Beth Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her publications include Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies (2011), A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900 (co-ed with Adelene Buckland, 2011), Sensation Drama, 1860-1880: An Anthology (co-ed with Johanna Hofer-Robinson, 2019) and Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century (co-ed with Amelia Yeates, 2021). She is currently finishing her monograph entitled Sensational Stories across Nineteenth-Century Media for Edinburgh University Press.
Pam Palsat is a UK-trained, Toronto-based actor. Her varied roles include John of Gaunt (Richard II), a serial killer and a catty salesperson. Penny Bloods gave her the chance to voice a romantic lead.
Arnold Anthony Schmidt is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Stanislaus. In addition to the Tales from the Penny Bloods, he has also written for film, TV, and the stage. His academic publications include British Nautical Melodramas, 1820-1850 (Routledge, 2019) and Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010).
Erin Temple is a graduate Student at Ohio State University. Her work is at the intersection of adaptation studies, transmedial narratology, and (Neo)Victorian Literature and culture. She is currently working on a dissertation project that explores Neo-Victorian characters, plots, and storyworlds across media.
Thomas Vranken is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of the South Pacific. His research explores Victorian periodicals and print culture more broadly. His publications include Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Ink Stains (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (Routledge, 2019).
Julia Warren creates narratives and illustrates them; a published novelist of historical mysteries that slip between times, she also writes for audio, stage & film. With an interest in history, surrealism, the absurd, and a pinch of humour…. B.A. in Fine Art (Venice, Italy). M.A. in Filmmaking (de Montfort/Raindance).