Issue 8.3 (Winter 2012)

Contributor Biographies

Kellie Holzer is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan College where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature. Her book project, Tying the Knot: Marital Fictions in India and England 1753-1907, examines correspondences in the ways marriage was emplotted in law and literature in colonial India and England. Her research interests include colonial discourse and post-colonial theory, the nineteenth-century Indian novel, the Victorian periodical press and matrimonial advertisements.

Joanna Lackey is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her dissertation, “Things That Matter: Commodities, Clutter, and the Objects of Victorian Literature,” examines the literal and figurative meanings of domestic material culture.

Sara L. Maurer is an associate professor of English and fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book The Dispossessed State: Britain, Ireland, and Narratives of Ownership in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) focuses on literature of the British Isles that narrates Ireland as the site of a unique, culturally specific style of ownership. Her current research explores the ways of knowing and feeling that Victorians associated with charitable action.

Jenn McCollum is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington where she studies Victorian literature and gender theory.  She has published a variety of scholarly articles concerning nineteenth-century gender politics, writing about topics such as female pedophilia, Victorian consciousness, and the literary aesthetics of early photography. Her primarily research interest is in the representation of grotesque bodies in fiction and fine art, including ballet.

Supritha Rajan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rochester, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature and creative writing. She has recently completed a manuscript entitled A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

LeeAnne M. Richardson is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she teaches courses in Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture. Author of New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Late-Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire (2006), her research centers on late-century writers. She is currently working on two projects, one investigating the literary politics implicit in the poetry of “Michael Field” (Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley), and the other addressing the non-fiction prose of Olive Schreiner and Josephine Butler. 

Robin Sopher recently received her Ph.D. in English literature from McMaster University.  Her current research project involves peripheral male characters in George Eliot's fiction.

Joshua Taft is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Missouri. His research focuses on nineteenth-century literature, religious studies, and literary form. His article on George Gissing has appeared in ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and an article on Christina Rossetti’s devotional sonnets is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry. He is currently at work on a book-length study of secularization and aesthetics in Victorian literature.

Virginia Zimmerman is an associate professor of English at Bucknell University. She has published articles in Children’s Literature, Victorian Periodicals Review, Configurations, and the Journal of Literature and Science. Her book, Excavating Victorians (SUNY Press, 2008), examines literary responses to the expansion of the time scale with special consideration of archaeology and geology. Her recent work considers archaeology in Victorian poetry and nineteenth-century science writing for children.