Contributors
Mashael I. Alhammad is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Leeds. Her thesis examines the reception of American literary celebrities in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her broader interests include celebrity studies, transatlantic studies, and the history of reading. She also works as a lecturer in English literature at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia.
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.
Katherine Bowers is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first monograph, Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic, is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press. She serves as Vice-President of the North American Dostoevsky Society.
Rob Breton is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. He has written books and papers on Chartist fiction, including The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction (Routledge, 2016) and on popular fiction, including his latest book, The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press, 2021).
Asma Char has recently been awarded her PhD degree in English from the University of Exeter. Her doctoral thesis is a comparative study of early feminism in the Arab world and Britain and focuses on the New Woman phenomenon at the fin de siècle. Her research interests include the long nineteenth century, the New Woman, narrative fiction, Arabic Nahda, cultural histories and translation. She has worked with the organising committees for different conferences and academic events in the UK and beyond.
Monica Cohen teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is author of Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (Cambridge University Press) and Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-century Popular Culture (University of Virginia Press). She has published numerous articles in academic journals, including Studies in English Literature, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, and Studies in the Novel. In 2009, she won the Tony Hilfer Prize for most outstanding essay to appear in Texas Studies in Language and Literature. From 2013-15, she served as Special Delegate to the MLA, representing Women in the Profession.
Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-70 (Ashgate, 2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914 (Delaware University Press, 2011). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (Routledge, 2016 & 2017), with Andrew King and John Morton. Her third essay collection, Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s, co-edited with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. Her most recent book publication, New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832-60 (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), was a 2019 recipient of the Linda H. Peterson Prize awarded by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
Katerina García-Walsh is a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews working on trauma and memory in Margaret Oliphant’s Gothic. Her previous education includes an MA in Literary Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid, an MSt (1830-1914) from Oxford and a BA (summa cum laude) from Georgetown.
Taryn Hakala is Assistant Professor of English at California State University Channel Islands. Her work has appeared in Philological Quarterly, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the representation of dialect in Victorian literature and theatre.
Erica Haugtvedt is an Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Haugtvedt specialises in nineteenth-century British literature, serial narrative, and popular culture. She received a 2020 Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for her current book project, Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Nineteenth Century. Her recent publications have appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures (36), Victorian Studies (59.3), and Victorian Periodicals Review (49.3, 49.1).
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 a Co-Director of the Centre for the Novel, the Secretary of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, an Associate Editor of the VPFJ, and co-editor of the book series Key Popular Women Writers.
Maria Juko is a PhD student with a focus on Victorian Literature at the University of Hamburg. She researches women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering novels, conduct books, and self-help literature of the period. She further examines adaptations of the period in comics, film and literature.
Robert Laurella completed his PhD in English at the University of Oxford. His thesis, Wilkie Collins and the Politics of Adaptation on the Victorian Stage, restores to critical attention the dramatic adaptations Collins – one of the most widely read and taught novelists of the nineteenth century – wrote based on his own novels.
Brian Maidment is Emeritus Professor of the History of Print at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-1850 (Manchester University Press 2013) and Robert Seymour and Nineteenth Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration (Routledge 2021) as well as a number of essays on comic illustration in the late Regency and Victorian period.
Julianne Smith is Professor of English at Pepperdine University. She studies Victorian drama and adaptation and has published several articles on Bleak House adaptations.