Issue 6.1 (Spring 2010)

Contributor Biographies

Maeve Adams is a Doctoral Candidate and Lecturer at New York University. Her current project (and dissertation) is entitled “Forms of Persuasion in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”

Sumangala Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor of English at Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges.  Her research interests focus on Victorian literature and culture, with emphasis on gender and colonial issues.  She has published articles on nineteenth-century material culture.  She is currently working on a book project entitled Victorian Hunger.

Lesley A. Hall is an archivist at the Wellcome Library and an honorary lecturer in History of Medicine at University College London. She has published several books and numerous articles, chapters and reviews on gender and sexuality in the UK during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (with the late Roy Porter) The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in England, 1650-1950 (Yale, 1995); Sex, Gender and Social Change, 1880 to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); and Outspoken Women: Women Writing about Sex, 1870-1969 (Routledge, 2005). Her biography of the British feminist socialist sex radical, Stella Browne, is forthcoming from I. B. Tauris. She maintains the website www.lesleyahall.net on women’s history, history of sexuality, Victoriana and related matters and is a founding editor of the H-Histsex listserv.

Kelly Hager is Associate Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Simmons College, where she teaches Victorian literature and children’s literature. She is the author of Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (Ashgate, 2010) and of articles on children’s literature and canon formation and the Brontës and adolescence. A contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, Keywords for Children’s Literature, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, she is currently working on “Novel Constructions,” a project that considers how the novel constructs ideas of physical, intellectual, and psychosexual health.

Jessica Hindes took her BA in English at the University of Cambridge, and her MSt in the literature of the period 1780-1900 at Oxford. She is currently working as a research administrator at King’s College London, and hopes to start a PhD in the fall of 2010. She wrote her final-year dissertation on women’s fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Patricia E. Johnson is Professor of Humanities and English at Penn State Harrisburg.  She is the author of Hidden Hands:  Working-Class Women and Victorian Social Problem Fiction (2001) and has published articles on Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Ethel Carnie.

Kathrine Klein recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Grace Aguilar’s Historical Romances’, at Queen Mary, University of London.  In it, she shifts current criticism on Aguilar’s Jewish writings to suggest instead that Aguilar was an architect of conservative, English domestic values that the Victorian era became notable for.  Kathrine has written a number of articles on Aguilar’s version of nineteenth-century domesticity for eSharp, and has forthcoming articles in Brontë Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and Leeds Working Papers.  Kathrine’s research interests include: Grace Aguilar’s historical fiction; nineteenth-century domesticity, masculinity, and femininity; and, nineteenth-century literary annuals and gift books.

Sumiao Li is an assistant professor of English with New York Institute of Technology.  She currently serves as writing director for the Institute’s global program in Nanjing, China and teaches courses in literature, writing and gender studies.  She has published in Feminist Studies and other channels.

Stefanie Markovits is an associate professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006) and The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Currently, she is at work on a study of the Victorian verse-novel.

Kate Faber Oestreich is currently a lecturer at Coastal Carolina University, where she will become Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing, and New Media in Fall 2010. Her article on George Eliot’s Adam Bede is included in the anthology,Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of Heterosexual Desire in Literature (2006). She is currently writing (with Daniel J. Ennis) an article entitled, “The E-Gothic and its Discontents” and an article on sartorial expression in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Kate’s areas of specialization include Victorian literature; critical theory, especially those concerned with feminism, hierarchies of sexual pleasure, cultural materialism, and sartorial semiotics; and multimodal composition.

Patricia Rigg is Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada.  She has published articles and books on Robert Browning and Augusta Webster, most recently Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). 

Anna Dodson Saikin is a doctoral student at Rice University. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, women and the novel, and the Romantic sublime.