Issue 12.3 (Winter 2016)

Contributor Biographies

Philippa Abbott is a PhD student at the University of Sunderland. Her thesis – “Newgate Culture” – considers the influence on the Newgate novel of various Victorian discourses, and the narratives they generated in order to highlight how the Newgate novel both influences and reflects contemporary culture. Philippa has presented at the Victorian Popular Fiction Association 2015 Conference as well as at the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States 2015 Conference. She has recently been accepted to review an online resource relating to Victorian Popular Culture, to be published in 2016.

Brooke Fortune is a PhD student at University of Florida. She specializes in Victorian crime and Gothic fiction, as well as early 20th century Irish poetry.

Janine Hatter is an Early Career Researcher whose research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, short stories as a genre, and Victorian women’s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic. She is co-editor of two series: Key Popular Women Writers and New Paths in Victorian Fiction and Culture, both for Edward Everett Root Publishers.

Susan Hroncek was recently awarded her PhD in English and Film Studies from Wilfrid Laurier University (Ontario, Canada) for her dissertation entitled Strange Compositions: Chemistry and its Occult History in Victorian Speculative Fiction. She is an editorial assistant for the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Women’s Print Media in Interwar Britain (1918-1939) and its companion online archive (http://interwarfeminism.omeka.net/). Her next project will examine depictions of the chemical industry and the chemistry of photography in Victorian literature.

Helena Ifill teaches English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests focus on the interactions between Victorian popular fiction, (pseudo)science and medicine. She is co-organiser for the Victorian Popular Fiction Association annual conference and co-director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Sheffield. She has published on Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Victorian mesmerism and is currently completing a monograph on sensation fiction and an article on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She is co-editor of two series: Key Popular Women Writers and New Paths in Victorian Fiction and Culture, both for Edward Everett Root Publishers.

Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature and Head of English Studies at Durham University. He is the author of monographs on George Gissing and H. G. Wells, and the co-editor, with Christine Huguet, of George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (Ashgate, 2013). His current projects include a scholarly edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, and a study of the making of male bonds in fin-de-siècle fiction.

Flore Janssen is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests center on issues of gender and social class in the Victorian period, and her thesis examines the representation of international socio-economic problems in the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British female activist writers.

Mary Clai Jones gained her PhD from the University of Kentucky and is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Writing Area Coordinator for the Department of English, Foreign Languages, & Journalism at Lincoln University, Jefferson City. She teaches developmental composition and rhetoric, Introduction to Literature, and Victorian Literature classes. She is currently experimenting with digital literacy in the basic writing classroom.

Sarah Kniesler is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida where she is completing her dissertation on female desire in Victorian popular fiction. Her research interests include the long nineteenth-century novel, detective fiction, and motherhood.

Erin Louttit is an independent scholar. Her research interests include literary faiths, gender and the occult, Victorian literature and culture, and the supernatural.

Indu Ohri is a sixth-year English PhD student at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Victorian British literature, women writers, and the Gothic. She is currently writing her dissertation, The Cultural Anxieties in Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories, 1847-1917. Her project examines how the ghosts in women’s supernatural fiction reflect various unspeakable social concerns of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Her article examining the ways in which Amelia Edwards’s ghost stories offer an ecocritical critique of the destructive effects of Victorian tourism has appeared in the VIJ Digital Annex 42.

Sarah Parker is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her first monograph is The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889-1930 (Routledge, 2013).  Her other publications include articles on Michael Field and Olive Custance, and chapters on Amy Lowell, Amy Levy and Djuna Barnes. She is currently working on a monograph project entitled Picturing the Poetess: Women Poets and Photography, 1880-1930. Her most recent article from this project is entitled 'Publicity, Celebrity, Fashion: Photographing Edna St. Vincent Millay' (Women’s Studies 45.4, May 2016). 

Shannon Scott is an Instructor of English at the University of St. Thomas. She has published articles and book reviews in various academic publications and newspapers. In 2013, she co-edited with Alexis Easley the collection, Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896. Shannon has also presented papers at different venues, including the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference in London, North Carolina State University, the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in Chicago, and “The Company of Wolves” conference at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2015, her essay, “Female Werewolf as Monstrous Other in Honoré Beaugrand’s “The Werewolves” was published in She-Wolf: A Cultural History of the Female Werewolf by Manchester University Press.