Contributors
Kathleen Beal is a PhD candidate at the University of Hull. Her research focuses on the representation of the disease, disability and disfigurement in the Victorian novel, with particular interest in the work of Wilkie Collins. She has a special interest in health and medicine in the nineteenth-century, especially the treatments offered to women in fiction and reality.
Abigail Burnham Bloom is author of the volume on Geraldine Jewsbury in the Key Popular Women Writers series and another book on Jewsbury that came out the same year: Leading the Way for Victorian Women: Geraldine Jewsbury and Victorian Culture. She is Managing Editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture, co-editor of Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters (1994) and author of many articles.
Manon Burz-Labrande is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Vienna, Austria. Specialising in Victorian popular literature and culture, her PhD explores the concept of circulation in and of the penny bloods and penny dreadfuls, through a literary and cultural analysis of their content, the discourses they triggered in nineteenth-century criticism, their place in the Victorian literary landscape and their diachronic circulation.
Cole Xinqiang Chang received his doctoral degree in English literature from the University of Rhode Island in May 2021. His dissertation, titled Fantasizing Reproduction: the Biologization of Progress in Victorian Literature, investigates the confluence of sexual reproduction and natural science in Victorian literary texts. He was a graduate fellow of the NVSA Diversity Mentorship Program in 2018 and 2019.
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 with Andrew King.
Annachiara Cozzi received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Pavia in 2020 with a dissertation entitled “Literary Collaboration in Late Victorian Britain.” Her research interests focus on co-authorship in novel writing, the figure of the author and the fin de siècle.
Helena Goodwyn is Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Her work has featured in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Women’s Writing. Her first monograph, The Americanization of W. T. Stead, will be published by Edinburgh University Press.
Janine Hatter is based at the University of Hull. Her research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Gothic, crime, sensation and science fiction, the theatre and identity, and Victorian women’s life writing. She is one of the co-organisers of the VPFA annual conference, Associate Editor of the VPFJ ‑ and editor of the book series key Popular Women Writers.
Katie Holdway is a PhD researcher in the Department of English at the University of Southampton. Her project, funded by the Wolfson Foundation, is entitled Pickwick in the Papers: Dickens and the Politics of Appropriation in the Newspaper Press, 1836-1870. Katie also researches the poetry of the British Della Cruscan coterie, and her article “Unstable Audiences in Della Cruscan Poetic Conversation” was published in Romanticism in 2020. She is co-founder of Romance, Revolution & Reform, and convenes the Postgraduate Research Forum for the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research (SCNR).
Joseph Holloway is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and situated in English Literature/Disability Studies. He is currently exploring representations of conjoinment in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, drawing on a generous interpretation of ‘texts’ including side-show promotional material, newspaper advertisements, interview transcripts, in addition to more traditional English Literature materials. He is editor of the postgraduate English Literature, Creative Writing, and Film Studies journal Exclamat!on (@exclamationAIJ), editor of the Postgraduate Journal for Medical Humanities (@ExeterMedHumsPG) book reviews editor for Literature & History (SAGE) and can be followed via (@EngTwiterature).
Helena Ifill is based at the University of Aberdeen. 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 early 2018. She is Associate Editor of the VPFJ ‑ and editor of the book series key Popular Women Writers.
Andrew King is co-editor of the VPFJ. He is Professor of English at the University of Greenwich and specialises in nineteenth-century print communication. His current research is based on BLT19, a project concerned to get us to think about the stories we tell ourselves and others about work. His next project is on the ecologies of the Victorian print industry and – he hopes – the one after that will see him return to his long overdue literary biography of Ouida (after all, who else has seen Lotteringo Lotteringhi della Stufa or found Ouida’s court records?).
Carolyn Lambert, the author of the volume of Frances Trollope for the Key Popular Women Writers series, is a visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton where she teaches nineteenth-century literature. She is the author of The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction (2013) and co-editor with Marion Shaw of For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women (2017).
Beth Mills is a Fourth-Year PhD Researcher, supervised at the University of Exeter and the University of Reading. Her thesis examines representations of scientific identity, evidence, and knowledge in the scientific writings and popular fiction of the late-Victorian author, Grant Allen. Her project is funded by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
Alison Moulds is a literary scholar and cultural historian. Following a DPhil at the University of Oxford, she held research and engagement positions on projects at Oxford, the University of Roehampton, and Queen Mary, University of London. She now works in health policy. Her first book, Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s-1910s, came out with Palgrave in the summer of 2021.
Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History and Deputy Director of the Institute of English Studies in the University of London. Recent books include William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel (2014), Gateway to the Modern: Resituating J.M. Barrie (2014), co-edited with Valentina Bold, and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 7: The Twentieth Century and Beyond (2019), co-edited with Claire Squires and Ian Willison.
Catherine Pope is a writer, publisher and workshop facilitator. Her volume on Florence Marryat was published in the Key Popular Women Writers series in 2020
Valerie Sanders is Professor of English at the University of Hull. She has published widely on Margaret Oliphant (including the volume in the Key Popular Women Writers series) and also on Harriet Martineau. Her monographs include Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (1996), The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002) and The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood.
Mercedes Sheldon is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota. Prior to this, she taught first in secondary schools and then as an adjunct instructor in English literature and composition. Her research interests include representations of womanhood and marriage within popular fiction in nineteenth century periodicals. Her work has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review.
Isobel Sigley (she/her) is a Doctoral Researcher at Loughborough University researching touch in women’s short fiction at the fin de siècle. Her article extends her conference paper delivered at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association 2020 annual conference, which discussed tactile encounters in George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and won the Key Popular Women Writers PGR Paper prize.