Issue 19.2 (Summer 2023)

Contributor Biographies

Dan Abitz is the Associate Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association at Georgia State University. His work on Victorian literature, women’s writing, and queer theory has appeared variously in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Victorians, The Henry James Review, The Comparatist, Palgrave’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, and multiple edited collections. He currently lives in Chosewood Park in Atlanta where he and his beagle Milo can be seen walking all around and through the neighborhood.

Rebecca Nesvet is a 2022–23 UW System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nesvet’s research on Victorian literature is published in Victorian Review, Victorians Institute Journal, Nineteenth Century Studies, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, Scholarly Editing, and in edited volumes from Routledge, the University of Wales Press, and Salem Press. Nesvet is a Technical Director at COVE Editions (covecollective.org) and Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.

Mary Mussman is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where they work on British and French literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their dissertation, “Intimate Reading: Femininity, Sexuality, and Literary Subcultures of Britain and France,” reflects research interests in the significance of literary texts for gender and sexual minorities since the mid-nineteenth century. Mary holds an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from UC Berkeley and a BA in Literature from Yale. Their creative writing can be found in The White Review, Fieldnotes, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Margaret Speer teaches Victorian and Modernist literature, and Medical Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where she received her PhD in English in 2022. She studies British culture of the Long Nineteenth Century, and histories of whiteness and sexuality. Her work on cross-gender ventriloquism, “Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire,” appears in the Journal of Victorian Culture, and her writing on materialist feminism, “A Schoolhouse of Their Own: Economic Erotics in The Children’s Hour,” appears in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has published her research, as well as activist and creative work, with The Los Angeles Review, Eclectica Magazine, and The National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Her current book project is entitled Suffisaunce, Switching, and Single White Female Sex Panic.

Scotty Streitfeld is lecturer in English at the University of California, Irvine, and researches the construction of normality in literature and culture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their article “Numbered Erotics: Quantified Sexualities and Enumerative Aesthetics in Nightwood and The Young and Evil” can be found in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. Their book project, Return to Normalcy: Queer Modernism and the Everyday, follows early-twentieth century writers as they grapple with transformations in gender and sexual definition amid global crises. They currently reside in Oceanside, CA, with their partner and two cats.