Issue 5.1 (Spring 2009)

Contributor Biographies

Dr. Éadaoin Agnew recently completed her PhD thesis, entitled “From Memsahibs to Missionaries: Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Travel Writing in India.” She is currently a teaching assistant at Queen’s University, Belfast, and having published articles on Lady Hariot Dufferin’s unpublished letters and photographs, she is now preparing to publish her thesis as a monograph.

Lee Behlman is an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University, where he teaches courses on Victorian poetry and prose, gender studies, and classical and biblical literatures in translation. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and has taught at Kansas State University. Much of his published work has focused on the way nineteenth-century writers received the classical past, in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Prose and Victorian Poetry, and in the recent book collection Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum (2007).

Susan David Bernstein, Professor of English, Jewish Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and the editor of two novels by Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs (Broadview Press, 2006). She is completing a co-edited collection, Victorian Vulgarity (Ashgate Press), and a book project on women at the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf.

Scott Brennan-Smith teaches Art History at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California. His range of courses reflects his far-reaching interests, but he focuses his research and writing on 19th Century British Art and in particular the Arts and Crafts movement.

William D. Driscoll currently is a graduate student at Queens College and an English teacher at Flushing High School. Additionally, he worked for several years as an adjunct lecturer in Literature and Propaganda at LaGuardia Community College.

Kay Heath is an associate professor of English at Virginia State University and the author of Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (SUNY Press, 2009).

Carol Engelhardt Herringer is Associate Professor of History at Wright State University. She is the author of Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830-85 (Manchester University Press, 2008), as well as of several articles on religion and culture in Victorian England. Her current project examines the religious and cultural significance of the Eucharistic debates in the Victorian Church of England.

Kristin Huston is an Interdisciplinary PhD student in English and History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include the Brontës and depictions of the female body and sexuality in nineteenth-century art and literature.   

Joseph McLaughlin is an associate professor and chair of the English Department at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. He is the author of Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (University of Virginia Press, 2000). His current projects include a book-length study on representations of Japan in late-Victorian London, as well as research on the relationship between religion and finance in Victorian literature and culture.

Sharleen Mondal currently holds a post-doctoral teaching appointment at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she has taught courses in Victorian literature and culture, early nineteenth-century British literature, and South Asian literature.  Her current book project explores Victorian liberal theories of “progress” and constructions of colonized women’s sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth-century British and South Asian literature. 

Amy J. Robinson recently defended her dissertation, “The Comedy of Small-Scale Crises: How Humor Mediates Change in Mid-Victorian Country Town Novels,” at the University of Florida. She is the Coordinator of the Gainesville Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

Sara Steger is an English PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, where her scholarly and pedagogical interests focus on nineteenth-century British literature and humanities computing.  In her work, Sara explores the low-level markers (patterns in vocabulary) that correspond to the higher-level formation of sentimentality in mid-Victorian novels. She currently works on two digital projects: the MONK project, which seeks to provide scholars the means of performing and visualizing the results of text analysis and text mining routines across existing digital library collections, and the <emma> project, a digital writing environment that aggregates and transforms student writing and peer/instructor feedback into information-rich document displays.  

Brenda R. Weber is an assistant professor in Gender Studies, with adjunct appointments in English, American Studies, and Cultural Studies, at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Duke University Press, 2009). Her book projects in progress are “Figuring Fame: Women, Gender, and the Body in the Transatlantic Production of Literary Celebrity” and “Mediating Masculinities: Conceptualizing American Masculinity in a Post-Millennial Mediascape.”