Issue 11.3 (Winter 2015)

Contributor Biographies

Rachel Ablow is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, 2007), the editor of The Feeling of Reading: Victorian Literature and Affective Experience (Michigan, 2010), and the editor of a special issue of Victorian Studies on “Victorian Feeling.” She is currently completing a monograph entitled, “Victorian Pain,” and is co-editing with James Bono (History and Medicine, UB) a collection on pain entitled, “Pain: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics.”

Mary Jean Corbett is University Distinguished Professor of English and an Affiliate of both the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (Oxford, 1992); Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: History, Politics, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge, 2000); and Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 2008). Her current research explores late-Victorian contexts for the life and writing of Virginia Woolf.

Julia Fuller is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center, where she is working on a dissertation entitled “The Sportswoman and Athleticized Female Bodies in Victorian Literature, 1862-1915.” Her article, “Redemptive Nursing and the Remarriageable Heroine in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Diana of the Crossways” appears in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Summer 2013). She is a Writing Fellow at York College (CUNY) and an instructor in the English Department at Hunter College (CUNY).

Meechal Hoffman is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center. Her dissertation is entitled “Bad Relations: Feeling Wrong in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” With Livia Arndal Woods, she co-chaired the 2015 British Women Writers Conference in New York. She is the Associate Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, CUNY.

Anna E. MacDonald recently received a Master’s degree in Victorian Literature at the University of Ottawa (Canada), and is a winner of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarship and travel award from the British Women Writers Conference (BWWC-2015). Her thesis was nominated for the university’s graduate prize for outstanding academic achievement, and her current research focuses on depictions of bodily fluids and narratives of female embodiment in Victorian literature, with a focus on women’s poetry.

Constance Walker, Class of 1944 Professor of English and the Liberal Arts, earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches courses in British Romanticism, Jane Austen, and Irish literature at Carleton College.  She has served as assistant editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal, and has published essays on Mary and Percy Shelley and on the nineteenth-century Shetland writer Dorothea Primrose Campbell, whose previously unknown works she recently discovered.  She is currently at work on a database and anthology of British women’s poems on the arts.

Mimi Winick is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University where she is completing her dissertation, “Studied Enchantment: Historical Fiction, Comparative Religion, and the Imaginative Use of Scholarship in Britain, 1862–1941.” Her article, “Modernist Feminist Witchcraft: Margaret Murray’s Fantastic Scholarship and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Realist Fantasy” appears in Modernism/Modernity (September 2015). Her chapter on Jane Ellen Harrison and alternative theories of secularization will appear in the forthcoming collection from Palgrave, Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness.

Livia Arndal Woods defended a dissertation titled “Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel” under the direction of Professor Talia Schaffer at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center. Her work has appeared in Victorian Network and Nineteenth Century Contexts. With Meechal Hoffman, she co-chaired the 2015 British Women Writers Conference in New York and she is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College (CUNY).

Nancy Yousef is Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Baruch College, City University of New York.  She is the author of Romantic Intimacy (Stanford UP, 2013) and Isolated Cases (Cornell UP, 2004).