Contributors
Rosie Blacher is a PhD student at Kingston University, London. Rosie has been awarded the AHRC Techne studentship for their doctoral studies and their thesis has the working title of Sensory Experience in the Contact Zone 1850-1925. Rosie has an interest in literature of travel in the Victorian and Modernist eras.
Charlotte Boyce is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Portsmouth, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literature, and has particular interests in food culture, the history of celebrity, and biofiction.
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, and 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.”
Rachel M. Friars, PhD, is an independent scholar in New Brunswick, Canada. She is the co-author of Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen (Anthem 2025), and her research interests include lesbian literature, film, and history, Anne Lister, neo-Victorian studies, Florence Marryat, Gothic fiction, and crime fiction.
Milly Kate Harrison is a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University. Her research examines queer errancy in fin-de-siècle Weird fiction, analysing how authors such as Algernon Blackwood and H. G. Wells articulated notions of “deviant masculinity” during a period of profound sexual and social upheaval.
Sophia C. Jochem recently completed her Ph.D. at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her current book project interrogates the critical concept of minor characters as a discursive category. She is also working on a new book, provisionally entitled “Writing with Vegetables, 1722–1870,” which explores imperial relationships with plants through their discontents.
Andrew King Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Greenwich. His projects currently include 1) co-editing the Oxford Handbook to Victorian Popular Fictions 2) writing a chapter on Victorian scandal in the context of privacy studies 3) finishing a European literary history of the concept of work.
Anouska Lester is an honorary research associate at the University of York, specialising in material culture. Her research restores the forgotten women who curated the material traces of Shakespeare’s life and works in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her PhD examined lost props and costumes and the nature of the early modern performance archive.
Diana Maltz is Professor of English at Southern Oregon University, where she teaches classes in Victorian literature. Her interest in Tom Crewe’s novel arose from studying figures like Edward Carpenter and Edith Ellis. She is completing a monograph tentatively titled Fictions of the New Life: Women Writing Ethical Socialism, 1880-1920.
Helen Mckenzie is an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at the Open University and Secretary of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association. 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.
Conner Moore is a PhD student at Miami University. His research focuses on structures of oppression in nineteenth-century British literature and his dissertation analyses the representations of animal oppression in decadent literature.
Claire O’Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, U.K. Her research focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture. Claire is an expert on the Brontës and on LGBTQIA+ literature and history—particularly the novels of Sarah Waters—and she has published widely in both areas.
V. J. René’s research focuses on phenomenology and affect theory in the works of A. C. Swinburne. They are the author of two pamphlets of poetry, Scavengers (Salo Press, 2021) and HYDRA (Marble Poetry, 2020). Recent creative and critical works appear in Forum Journal, the Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, and Propel Magazine.