Issue 9.2 (Summer 2013)

Contributor Biographies

Abigail Boucher is a first-year PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Glasgow. Her current research is on representations of the aristocracy in Victorian literature, especially as it concerns sexuality, medicine and degeneration. Previous research of interest has been on legal philosophy in the works of Wilkie Collins.

Christine Crockett is a Visiting Professor of Literature and the Associate Director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College. Her article “‘The Monster Vice’: Masturbation, Malady, and Monstrosity in Frankenstein” appears in the collection Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. This piece was originally presented as a work-in-progress at the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies conference in 2012. The questions and suggestions shared by audience contributed to the expansion of the piece. Christine is currently working on a book project titled Medical Gothic, an exploration of the discursive exchange between medical literature and the Gothic novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ally Crockford is a Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant at the University of Edinburgh; her research primarily focuses on the child figure in Victorian literature, as well as the medical humanities, disability history, and nineteenth-century teratology. After completing an AHRC Cultural Engagement Research Fellowship working with the University of Edinburgh and the Surgeons’ Hall Museum in May 2013, she has recently taken up the post of Wikimedian-in-Residence at the National Library of Scotland. Ally recently contributed a chapter to George MacDonald Amongst His Contemporaries (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2013), and has forthcoming chapters exploring the monstrous child figure in literature as well as teratology and the Foucauldian medical gaze. She is co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection inspired by the 2012 conference Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment.

Laura Doyle is Professor of English at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, co-convener of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) and of the Five College Atlantic/Global Studies Faculty Seminar.  Her recent work develops the notion of inter-imperiality (see Interventions 2013), and her books include Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940 (2008); Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (1994); and the edited collections Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture (2001) and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2004), the latter with Laura Winkiel.

Travis M. Foster is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author of articles published in American Literature, ESQ, and the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and is completing a monograph on literary culture and the politics of friendship in Civil War America. His chapter on nineteenth-century queer literature will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian American Literature.

Julia Fuller is a doctoral student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she studies Victorian literature and domestic culture. She holds a BA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MA from the University of Virginia. She is planning a dissertation on forms of embodiment of the middle-class marriageable woman.

Louise Penner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

Martha Schoolman is a scholar of antebellum US literature and the literatures and cultures of slavery and abolition in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Her monograph American Abolitionist Geographies is forthcoming in 2014 from University of Minnesota Press. She is coeditor with Jared Hickman of the essay collection Abolitionist Places (Routledge 2013). Her work has also appeared in the Arizona Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, and ESQ.

Joanne Townsend is an independent scholar based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been engaged in raising her two children since completing a PhD on venereal disease in Victorian Britain in the University of Melbourne’s Department of History in 1999. This article marks her return to this field of research.

Lena Wånggren is a Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, working with the new edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s collected literary production. Her recent research concerns questions of gender in late nineteenth-century literature and culture, specifically the interrelation between gender and technology and the figure of the New Woman. Lena is currently researching gender and medical authority in Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical stories, and is a co-editor of two forthcoming collections stemming from the 2011 conference Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses of Materiality in the Sciences and the Arts.

Helen Williams is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis explores the representation of medicine in the novels of Wilkie Collins and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her main interests are in depictions of medicine, illness and disability in Victorian literature and culture.