Issue 13.2 (Summer 2017)

Contributor Biographies

Susan David Bernstein recently moved from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was on the faculty since 1989, to Boston University.  Her research and teaching interests spanVictorian literature and culture, gender and life writing, digital humanities, the Victorian serial novel, the transatlantic nineteenth century including transatlantic Jewish literature.   Her publications include Roomscape: Women Writers in the Reading Room of the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf. (Edinburgh, 2013), Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (North Carolina, 1997), editions of two novels by Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (Broadview, 2006) and The Romance of a Shop (Broadview, 2006), and a collection, co-edited with Elsie B. Michie, Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (Ashgate, 2009). She was a co-organizer of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference in 2012, as well as the faculty advisor for 18th and 19th-Century British Women Writers Association Conference in 2002.

Abigail Boucher is a Lecturer in English Literature at Aston University. She specializes in genre and popular fiction of the long nineteenth century, especially as it concerns intersections of the body and class. She is a Postgraduate Representative for BAVS. She has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Revenant, and The Wilkie Collins Journal

Alice Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, and Programme Leader for English. She writes about gender and youth in the Victorian novel, and is completing a monograph for Routledge on Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction, focusing on the work of George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope (forthcoming 2018). She has published articles and chapters on masculinity, aging, the schoolboy body, dandyism, serialisation, and the Victorian valentine, and is currently working towards a new project on aging and speech/dialogue in Victorian fiction. She is part of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), and was co-organizer of the 2017 BAVS Conference in Lincoln.

Leah Grisham is a PhD student at George Washington University, where she focuses on depictions of women within the long nineteenth-century British novel. More specifically, she works with accounts of women who do not fit nineteenth-century standards of idealized, domestic womanhood. Her work pays special attention to women who were able to find agency within the patriarchal, hegemonic political system under which they lived. Leah completed a Master’s Degree in literature at Boston College in 2014, and has taught many writing and literature courses as a graduate student and adjunct instructor.

Peter Merchant is a Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. His recent work has seen him co-edit, with Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Imagined Child (Ashgate, 2015) and for Valancourt Books in 2017 assemble, under the title The Statement of Stella Maberly, a cluster of texts by F. Anstey.

Marta Miquel-Baldellou holds an International Doctorate in English Studies from the University of Lleida. During her doctoral studies, she implemented a research stay at the Victorian Studies Centre of the University of Leicester in the UK, which was funded through a government scholarship for PhD candidates. She is a member of the Dedal-Lit Research Group and a member of the European Network of Aging Studies. Her doctoral dissertation, Symbolic Transitions as Modalities of Aging: Intertextuality in the Life and Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Professor Dr. Brian Worsfold, focuses on the analysis of the literary works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe through a comparative and biographical approach, and it has recently been published in Germany. She has published in the field of aging studies and Victorian literature, and the results of her research have appeared in journals, such as Age, Culture, Humanities and Frame: A Journal of Literary Studies, and in books like Ageing Femininities: Troubling Representations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), The Ages of Life: Living and Aging in Conflict? (Transcript, 2013), and Literary Creativity and the Older Woman Writer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Peter Lang, 2016).

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is an internationally known age critic, essayist, activist, and prize-winning writer of nonfiction. Her main work is in age studies, a field she named in 1993. Her next book (forthcoming, August 2017) is Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her last, Agewise, won a 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award and will be published in Korean.  Aged by Culture was chosen a Notable Book of the year by the Christian Science Monitor. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife in 1998 won the Emily Toth award for the best feminist book on American popular culture. Her essays are frequently cited as notable in Best American Essays.  She has published in American Scholar, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Representations, Feminist Studies, Salmagundi, Kenyon Review.  A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting Fellowships, she is a Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Much of the research for this essay was conducted at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.

Jonathon Shears is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University. He works mainly on Romantic and Victorian literature and his books include The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost (2009), The Great Exhibition 1851: A Sourcebook (2017) and Byron’s Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind (2016). He is co-editing a special issue of Romanticism on the subject of ageing in the Romantic period and sits on the Advisory Board of the Keele Centre for Ageing Research. He has, since 2012, been editor of The Byron Journal.

Melanie Zynel is a Ph.D. candidate at Wayne State University. Her research centers on gender and disability in the long Eighteenth Century and her dissertation looks at representations of aging women in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century novels alongside contemporary theory on queer time.