Issue 3.2 (Summer 2007)

Contributor Biographies

Ann Ardis is a professor of English and Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities at the University of Delaware. She is the author of New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers, 1990) and Modernism and Cultural Conflict (Cambridge, 2002) and the co-editor, with Leslie Lewis, of Women’s Experience of Modernity (Johns Hopkins, 2002) and, with Bonnie Kime Scott, of Virginia Woolf Turning the Centuries (Pace, 2000). With Patrick Collier, she is currently editing a collection of essays on Anglo-American print culture, 1880-1940, which Palgrave will publish in 2008. She is also working currently on a single-author study, tentatively entitled "Before the Great Divides: Anglo-American Modernism in the Public Sphere, 1890-1922," about periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the century that sought to engage an increasingly diverse public in discussions of "modern" literature, art, and politics.

Susan David Bernstein, Sally Mead Hands Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (1997) and the editor of two novels by Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (2006) and Reuben Sachs (2006). She is completing a co-edited (with Elsie Michie) collection, Victorian Vulgarity (Ashgate Press). This essay comes from her current project on the Reading Room of the British Museum, gender, and space, from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf.

Jessica Damián is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, where she teaches literature and composition. Her current book project, Mining Romanticism: British Women Writers and South America, 1770-1860, examines the role which mining played in the construction of the British Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  In particular, she is interested in how women’s writing commented upon, questioned, and critiqued England’s transatlantic exploration and trade in the Americas.   Jessica has published on Caribbean literature and serves on the Editorial Board of Anthurium: A Caribbean Literary Studies Journal.  She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami at Coral Gables.

Christine DeVine is the Mary E. Dichmann/BORSF Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her recent publications include Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells (Ashgate 2005) and an edition of George Gissing’s Forster's Life of Dickens (Grayswood Press 2005). She has published articles on George Gissing, Henry James, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Her current research focuses on Victorian travelers to the New World. An essay from this work is forthcoming in a collection on James and Boston.

Julie Donovan practiced as a lawyer in London for almost ten years before she enrolled in   a Ph.D. program in British Literature at George Washington University, Washington DC. She graduated in May, 2007 after having completed a dissertation titled Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and the Politics of Style.

M. B. Hackler is Board of Regents Ph.D. Fellow in Folklore and Literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  His doctoral research focuses on issues of travel, tourism, and identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Jamie Horrocks is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is currently working as Managing Editor of Victorian Studies and is completing a dissertation entitled “Ethical Liberalism and the Performance of Aesthetic Character.”

Joy Johnson is currently pursuing her research interests in 19th century American literature and Victorian literature as a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and German from UGA and her M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee.

April Nixon Kendra is an independent scholar with a long-standing interest in Catherine Gore and the fashionable novel.  She has presented on Gore’s novels at several national conferences, and her article “Gendering the Silver Fork: Catherine Gore and the Society Novel” appears in Women’s Writing.  Dr. Kendra has also written several forthcoming essays on women’s writing in other popular forms, including science fiction, young adult literature, and inspirational romance.

Teresa Mangum, Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (U Michigan P, 1998). She is completing a book on Victorian attitudes toward aging and beginning a project, "Victorian Arguments With Animals." She is guest editor of two journal issues on late life: "Fashioning Age: Cultural Narratives of Later Life," Journal of Aging Studies (2003), and "Late Life in Common Culture," Journal of Aging and Identity (2002) and recently edited a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review (Winter 2006) focused on the teaching of periodicals.

Ashley Miller is a graduate student at Indiana University, where she is working on her PhD in Victorian Studies.  She is writing a dissertation about nineteenth-century British poetry and its interactions with print media and sense physiology.

Sally Mitchell, now Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at Temple University, is editor of a new series from Praeger, Victorian Life and Times. Her most recent book is Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (University of Virginia Press, 2004). She also wrote The New Girl (Columbia UP, 1995), edited Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1988), and has published books and articles on women writers, popular fiction, cheap periodicals and other topics. In addition, she is past president of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, has served a term on the MLA Executive Committee for the Victorian Period, and was for many years a member of the faculty board of review for Temple University Press.

Deborah Epstein Nord teaches in the English Department at Princeton University, where she also served for many years as director of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender. She is the author of The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City, and the forthcoming Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930 and editor of a scholarly edition of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. Prof. Nord currently serves on the advisory board of NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association).

Laura J. Rosenthal is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She is author of Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Cornell, 2006) and Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Cornell, 1996), and co-editor, with Mita Choudhury, of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Bucknell, 2002). She is currently working on varieties of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism in the British Empire.

Gregory Vargo is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University. His dissertation is titled “The World the Chartists Made: An Underground History of the Early Victorian Novel.” He has entries on radical journalism forthcoming in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism.

Marilyn Walker is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois.  Her research interests include eighteenth-century British women poets and slave narratives.  Ms. Walker has been awarded the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship for Historians and the Richard K. Barksdale Fellowship for African American Graduate Students.  In the fall of 2007, she will be presenting essays at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies and the Southern Conference on British Studies.  She is completing her dissertation entitled, “Writing Resistance: The Politics and Poetics of British Women’s Antislavery Verse, 1785-1865.”