Issue 20.2 (Summer 2024)

Contributor Biographies

Shuhita Bhattacharjee (www.shuhitabhattacharjee.com) earned her PhD from the University of Iowa and is an assistant professor of English literature and Gender & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts and an Affiliated Professor of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her research on Victorian literature, representations of gender and sexuality in popular culture, and the South Asian diaspora has appeared in English Literature in Transition, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Victorian Popular Fictions, and South Asian Studies, as well as in Palgrave, Cambridge, and Routledge essay collections. She has recently published her first monograph (Postsecular Theory: Texts and Contexts) and is working on the second that examines the fin-de-siècle representation of colonial idols in British and Anglo-Indian literature. In the social sector, she works nationally and internationally on sex education, gendered HIV-related violence, and prevention of sexual harassment.

Alicia Carroll is the author of New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond (University of Virginia Press, 2019). She is currently working on a book entitled “The Lives of Common Plants in Victorian Literature and Culture.” Carroll is Chair and Professor of English at Auburn University and Chair of The British Women Writers Association. She is currently creating an open-access digital archive project entitled “Early Green Women,” sharing primary materials documenting proto-environmentalist British women’s writing, gardening, art, and craft.

Dr. Jessica Durgan is Professor of English at Bemidji State University in Northern Minnesota, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and postcolonial studies. She is the author of the monograph Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel (Routledge 2019), which focuses on the intersection of art history, color technologies, and the racial sciences in nineteenth-century fiction. Her work has appeared in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Partial Answers, and Persuasions Online, and in the book collections The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture (2018) and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture (2014).

Katerina García-Walsh is an Associate of St Leonard’s at the University of St Andrews where she was recently awarded the PhD for her thesis Spectral Trauma and Narrative Memory in Margaret Oliphant’s Gothic, supervised by Dr Katie Garner. Katerina has also presented conference and seminar papers on Arthur Machen (CSWG Warwick 2019), Robert Louis Stevenson (Aesthetics of Decay Oxford 2020), Charles Dickens (VPFA 2021) and George Eliot (MLAIS Glasgow 2022). Her recent publications include “Mesmerism in Late Victorian Theatre” (CJES 2020) and “Oscar Wilde’s Misattributions: A Legacy of Gross Indecency” (VPFJ 2021). Her current research addresses the intersections of gender, trauma and the medical humanities in Victorian Gothic fiction.

Suvendu Ghatak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida, exploring the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives of malaria in South Asia (1780-1950). He has received fellowships from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and American Institute of India Studies. He has published or has forthcoming works inVolupté,Synapsis,Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, andGlobal Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Mary-Catherine Harrison is Associate Professor and Chair of English at University of Detroit Mercy and past president of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, where this project was first presented. Her research has focused primarily on nineteenth-century fiction, narrative empathy, and the psychology of reading, including publications on Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Michelle M. Taylor is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on British literature of the long nineteenth century, animal studies, religious studies, book history, and digital humanities. Her book project, Mongrel Genres: The Victorian Pedigree of the Literary Dog, examines the relationship between the concept of canine subjectivity and the development of several literary subgenres from the Romantic period to the present. Her other current research traces the influence of John Wesley and Methodism on Romantic poetry and the Victorian novel. She is also the Director of the Wesley Works Digitization Project.

Megan Burke Witzleben is an Associate Professor of English at Hilbert College. Specializing in material aspects of Victorian literature, she examines domestic environments as tools depicting interiority in the works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot. In addition to teaching literature courses such as The City in Literature and The Novel, she has written about homelessness in Victorian literature, women’s voices in architectural discourse, and teaching Dickens and Braddon through serials. Most recently, her chapter “‘The English Live at Home’: Periodicals’ Role in Exporting the British Home Ideal” was published in the book Becoming Home: Diaspora and the Anglophone Transnational (2022).

Chimi Woo is an assistant professor of English at Prairie View A&M University. She holds a PhD in English from the Ohio State University, specializing in the nineteenth-century British novel and postcolonial studies. A native of South Korea, she received her BA in English literature and language at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, the novel, the Irish national tale, postcolonial studies, genre studies, and religion and literature.