Issue 3.1 (Summer 2007)

Contributor Biographies

Giuseppe Albano currently teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he has recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is grateful to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for their support which allowed some of the research for this article to be conducted.

Nicholas Birns lives in New York City where he teaches literature at The New School. His teaching specialties include Victorian and modern fiction and literary theory. His current book project involves connections between Henry James, Walter Pater, and Friedrich Nietzsche. A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900, co-edited with Rebecca McNeer, will appear from Camden House in fall 2007. He is the editor of Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature and has held visiting fellowships in Australia and Sweden.

Kathleen Blake is Professor of English at the University of Washington, author of Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll and Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature and editor of Approaches to Teaching George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She has published on a range of Victorian writers, with a contribution to the Cambridge Companion to George Eliot and a recent article on Eliot in Victorian Literature and Culture. Her current book project is Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy.

Alison Booth is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (U Chicago P, 2004), winner of the WAWH Barbara Penny Kanner Prize, and Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell UP, 1992), and editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure (1993). Currently president of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, she is co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Literature (8th and 9th editions), and serves on the Board of the University of Virginia Press. With Herbert Tucker and other colleagues, she is co-organizer of the Third Annual North American Victorian Studies Association Conference in 2005 at the University of Virginia. Articles spanning Victorian to contemporary culture in Britain and the U.S. have appeared in Victorian Studies, Narrative, Kenyon Review, American Literary History, and other journals and collections. Her focus in recent years on prosopography or collective biographical history emerged from her rediscovery of more than 900 volumes of short lives of women published in English between 1830-1940 (not counting reference works); the online bibliography is a continually expanding resource: <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/WomensBios>. Her recent work on the theory and history of life narrative and prosopography has appeared in Blackwell's Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) or will soon appear in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. Amigoni (Ashgate) and Journal of Victorian Culture. She is engaged in a book-length study of the "homes and haunts" genre as a form of prosopography that unites literary tourism, life narrative, and gothic conventions.

Dagni Bredesen (Ph.D.University of Washington) teaches in the English Department of Eastern Illinois University. She has two recently published articles “Managing Money in Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds” (Victorian Review) and “Conformist Subversion: Ambivalent Agency in Revelations of a Lady Detective (as part of a special issue on Victorian Detection in Clues: A Journal of Detection). She has a book project on the go: Over His Dead Body: Widows in Victorian Literature and Culture and is also working with Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints to produce a volume containing new editions of both The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Susan Casteras served for many years as Curator of Paintings at the Yale Center for British Art before moving to Seattle, where she is Professor of Art History at the University of Washington. The author of several dozen books, articles, and essays on Victorian visual culture, she is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her current research focuses on various iconological subjects, including a book on Victorian religious painting.

Katherine D. Harris, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, San José State University, specializes in Romantic-era and nineteenth-century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, textuality and hypertextuality. She edits an online resource for the study of literary annuals, The Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive (www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/FMN/Index.htm) which will also become part of her most recent work, a comprehensive literary history of British annuals. With Laura Mandell, Virginia Jackson, Eliza Richards and Harry Hootman, she edits The Poetess Archive, an online resource focusing on both British and American nineteenth-century authors (http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/). The accompanying Poetess Archive Journal currently contains articles by all editors, including Harris’ article “Borrowing, Altering and Perfecting the Literary Annual Form B or What It is Not: Emblems, Almanacs, Pocket-books, Albums, Scrapbooks and Gifts Books” (The Poetess Archive Journal 1.1, http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/PAJournal/index.html). She has also published in PBSA and edited collections on teaching textuality and theorizing the digital.

Simon Humphries, a member of Linacre College, Oxford, is currently editing Christina Rossetti’s Poems and Prose for Oxford University Press, and writing a book entitled The Uncertainty of Christina Rossetti.

Dr. Lisa Hartsell Jackson is a lecturer for the English department at the University of North Texas. She is an active member of the Dickens Fellowship and a contributor to the Oxford New Dictionary of National Biography.

Christopher Lane is Professor of English at Northwestern University. He's the author of four books on nineteenth-century British literature and culture: The Ruling Passion (Duke, 1995), The Burdens of Intimacy (Chicago, 1999), Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England (Columbia, 2004, 2006), and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007). He's also editor of The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia, 1998) and a co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago, 2001) and James Purdy: Selected Plays (Northwestern, 2007). His teaching and research interests focus chiefly on late-Victorian fiction, psychology (including psychoanalysis), and philosophy.

Chris Louttit's essays and reviews have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Dickens Quarterly, Wilkie Collins Society Journal and Byron Journal. His main research interests are in nineteenth-century fiction and prose, with a particular focus on the work of Charles Dickens, and on representations of Victorian masculinity. He is currently teaching part-time at the University of Leicester and at De Montfort University, and is also editor of Peer English, a new annual print journal for early-career research, produced jointly by the English department at Leicester and the English Association.

Tracey S. Rosenberg recently completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, writing a thesis on the late-Victorian writer Mona Caird. She previously studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brasenose College, Oxford, and held a Fulbright scholarship in creative writing. She has published articles on Caird in Women’s Writing and Folio (a publication of the National Library of Scotland), and contributed biographical articles to several works, including The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press) and The Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (Thoemmes Press).

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is a Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her most recent book is Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Cornell 2003), and she has published on George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf. She is currently co-editing an essay collection on Victorian maternity with Claudia Klaver of Syracuse University and beginning a book-length project on Victorian working class literature.