Issue 10.3 (Winter 2014)

Contributor Biographies

Mikhal Dekel is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the City University of New York. She is the author of The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011) and ha-Zionut ve-huladetah mekhadash shel ha-tragedia (Zionism and the Rebirth of Tragedy) (Bialik Institute Press, 2014). She has published articles, translations and blogs in ELH, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, Cambridge Literary Review, Jewish Social Studies and in various anthologies.

Maura Dunst is currently an Instructor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She completed her PhD at Cardiff University, where she wrote her dissertation on music in New Woman fiction.  Her research interests include Victorian literature, New Woman fiction, Britain in the 1890s, women’s writing, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Egerton, and music in literature.  She has a forthcoming article in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies on the cathedral chime in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and is preparing her doctoral research for publication as a monograph.

Laura Eastlake is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Glasgow. Her dissertation is entitled Engendering Antiquity: Masculinity and Ancient Rome in the Victorian Cultural Imagination. Laura received an MA in Classics (2008) and an MLitt in Victorian Literature (2010) from the University of Glasgow. She teaches across a range of literature modules including “The Novel and Narratology,” “Writing and Ideology’,” and a masters course on the classical tradition. Her research interests include Victorian classical receptions, masculinity studies, and nineteenth-century popular theatre.

Brigitte Nicole Fielder is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on two book projects. “Kinfullness: White Womanhood and Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures” and “Animal Humanism: Species, Race, and Humanity in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Essays from each of these projects have appeared in Studies in American Fiction and American Quarterly and other work is forthcoming in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Animals and Society Institute/Wesleyan University Animal Studies.

Alex Grammatikos is a Ph.D. candidate at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He previously studied at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, Canada) and The University of York (York, England). His doctoral project, The Emerging Modern Greek Nation and British Romantic Literature, 1790-1840, seeks to expand traditional understandings of Romantic Hellenism by investigating the ways in which early nineteenth-century British writers constructed Modern Greece and its people and how these literary engagements with Greece produced, ratified, and complicated Britain’s relationship with the then emerging nation. His other major research interests include nineteenth-century British print culture and Greek Romantic writing.

Elizabeth Meadows is a senior lecturer in English and the assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy.  Her book project examines how Victorian authors use marriage to problematize the social and material power of literary form.  She has published on Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, and the entropic marriage plot in Dickens Studies Annual, and her chapter on Anthony Trollope and nineteenth-century technologies of communication recently appeared in the Oxford Handbook to Victorian Literary Culture.

Esra Melikoğlu is Professor of English at Istanbul University. She is the author of Allies and Antagonists: The Ambivalent Relationship Between the Servant and the Child of the House in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Interactive Voices in Intertextual Literature: the ex-centric female, child, servant and colonised and critical essays on the servant character, post-colonial and feminist issues. She is also the co-editor of an anthology of English short stories and an anthology of American short stories (published in Turkey). Currently, her research is devoted to the (neo)gothic and ghost story.