Issue 4.3 (Winter 2008)

Contributor Biographies

Lynn M. Alexander is a professor of English and serves as department chair at the University of Tennessee at Martin.  The author of Women, Work, and Representation:  Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (Ohio UP, 2003), she also edited the Broadview edition of John Halifax, Gentleman (2005) and co-edited The Slaughter-House of Mammon:  An Anthology of Victorian Protest Literature (Locust Hill Press, 1992).  She continues to research British social-protest fiction.

Alexis Antonia is a PhD student and research assistant at CLLC University of Newcastle. She has worked as the CLLC's research assistant since its inception in 1989. When Ellen Jordan arrived at the CLLC asking for help with an attribution problem the two of them began creating a corpus of Victorian Periodical Literature. Since Alexis enjoyed working with these periodicals, she decided to apply for acceptance into a Research Higher Degree program which would allow her to explore issues such as anonymity, individuality and commonality in the nineteenth century periodicals using the methods of computational stylistics.

Kellie Holzer is a post-doctoral instructor in the Department of English at the University of Washington where she has taught courses in Victorian literature and culture, post-colonial literatures of South Asia, and women’s writing. Her dissertation analyzes marital fictions in nineteenth-century England and India. Her current research focuses on the trope of the harem in Victorian advertising and women’s travel writing. She is also finishing an English translation of Bhagyavati, a Hindi-language domestic novel first published in 1877.

Helena Ifill is a student at the University of Sheffield where she is currently in the process of completing her doctoral thesis on theories of determinism in Victorian science and literature.

Audrey Jaffe is the author of Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (1991) and Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (2000). She is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Ellen Jordan was appointed as a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle in 1988, becoming a Senior Lecturer in 1992. Since her retirement in 1998 she has continued to work in a conjoint capacity and has been the guiding light behind many successful higher degree completions. She has published extensively in the area of gender and nineteenth century studies.

Stephanie King is currently a lecturer at Concordia University in the Department of English. She recently earned her PhD from McGill University, where her research revolved around questions of masculinity and narratology in Victorian fiction. Her dissertation, entitled “Devious, Dashing, Disturbing: Fallen Men in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900,” questions Victorian conventions of narrative and gender by introducing the character of the fallen man as an identifiable nineteenth-century persona.  She is currently working on a project that links patrimony to violence and disfigurement in Victorian and Edwardian fiction. An article on this subject, “Violence as Patrimony in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas,” will be published in the forthcoming Gothic and Victorian Literature Anthology (McFarland Press 2009).

Monika Lee is an Associate Professor in English at Brescia University College affiliated with the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.  She is author of Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (1999), slender threads (2004 HMS Press), several essays on nineteenth-century, Canadian, medieval literature, and many published poems in literary journals and anthologies.   Her essays have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Essays in Literature, and English Studies in Canada.  She teaches nineteenth-century literature and interdisciplinary English/Women’s Studies courses in “Women and Literature” and the “Family and Literature”.

Anne Longmuir is an Assistant Professor of English at Kansas State University. Specializing in Victorian literature and Contemporary American fiction, her work has been published in journals such as Critique, Brontë Studies, The Explicator, Journal of Narrative Theory,and Modern Fiction Studies. This essay forms part of a book-length project on gender and national identity in mid-nineteenth century fiction. 

Associate Professor of English at University of Nevada Las Vegas, Kelly J. Mays is co-author (with Alison Booth) of The Norton Introduction to Literature (9th ed., 2005) and has published work on nineteenth-century British reading and publishing practices, as well as working-class and Chartist autobiography and poetry.

Jill Rappoport, Assistant Professor at Villanova University, is currently completing a book manuscript, Giving Women: Sisterhood and Exchange in Victorian Literature. Her essays on women’s gift economies have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture, and her article on “The Price of Redemption in ‘Goblin Market’” is forthcoming in Studies in English Literature.

Vicky Simpson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of New Brunswick.  Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, particularly writing by women, and Gothic and sensation fiction.  She has given conference presentations on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Brontë, and Stevie Smith, and has published articles on women’s poetry of World War I, Anna Jameson’s work on Victorian women’s education, and, with Dr. Wendy Robbins, pyramids of power in post-secondary education (forthcoming).  Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Family Fictions: From Queen Victoria to the Sensation Writers,” examines the sensationalization of family in mid-Victorian literature.

Kate Watson is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University. Her thesis considers nineteenth-century women’s crime fiction/crime narratives from America, Australia and Britain, and is “identifying the national body” between 1860-1880.