Issue 10.2 (Summer 2014)

Contributor Biographies

Susan David Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has been on the faculty since 1989, when she was hired to fill a position in women’s literature and feminist theory.  Her research and teaching interests include Victorian literature and culture, print culture and the history of the book, digital humanities, the Victorian serial novel, the transatlantic nineteenth century, Anglo-Jewish literature, Victorian science, environmental studies, and gender.   Her publications include Roomscape: Women Writers in the Reading Room of the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf. (Edinburgh, 2013), Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (North Carolina, 1997), editions of two novels by Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (Broadview, 2006) and The Romance of a Shop (Broadview, 2006), and a collection, co-edited with Elsie B. Michie, Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (Ashgate, 2009). She was a co-organizer of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference in 2012, as well as the faculty advisor for 18th and 19th-Century British Women Writers Association Conference in 2002.

Teri Finneman (MA, University of Missouri) is a doctoral student at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her research focuses on media coverage of U.S. first ladies and women politicians. She also studies early women journalists. Finneman is a former political reporter and multimedia correspondent who spent a dozen years working in the media industry. Her research to date has been published in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice. She recently finished a book chapter about first lady Grace Coolidge and co-authored a study about news coverage of Coolidge that is now in press at Women’s Studies in Communication. Finneman is currently working on an oral history project focused on U.S. women journalists.

Dr. F. Elizabeth Gray (PhD Virginia) teaches courses in professional writing, editing and publishing in the School of Communication, Journalism, and Marketing at Massey University, New Zealand.  Her research interests include the intersection of nineteenth-century poetry and journalism, the essays and poetry of Alice Meynell, and women’s journalism at the fin de siècle, as well as written and oral communication competencies in scientific and business workplaces. She has published a monograph, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (Routledge 2010), and edited a collection of essays, Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle: Making a Name for Herself (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).  Her articles have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, and English Literature in Transition, as well as in several communication journals.

Dr Nikki Hessell (PhD Toronto) is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literature program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.  She specializes in the relationship between journalism and literature in the eighteenth century and Romantic periods.  Her publications include Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Iveta Jusová is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Literature and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe at Antioch University. Her book The New Woman and the Empire was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2005. She has also published articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Continental European women writers, actresses and film directors in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Feminist Theory, Social Text, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Women’s Studies International Forum, Theatre History Studies, and other journals. Currently, she is co-editing and writing a book on Czech women and feminism.

Jean Marie Lutes, Associate Professor of English and co-director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Villanova University, is the author of Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1930 (Cornell, 2006) and the editor of Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly (Penguin Classics, 2014). She has published several journal articles, most recently “The Queer Newspaperwoman in Edith Eaton’s ‘The Success of a Mistake,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers  29:2 (2012).

Linda H. Peterson is author of Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (2009), editor of Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography (2012) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (2006), and essays on women’s authorship published in Women’s Writing, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and other periodicals.

Teja Varma Pusapati is a D.Phil student in English at the University of Oxford. Her thesis examines models of female professional authorship in Victorian England. She is particularly interested in representations of Victorian women’s journalism.

Lisa Robertson is a doctoral student at the University of Warwick where she is researching the relationship between literature and domestic architecture in late nineteenth-century London. Most recently, she has contributed to the Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture and the Literary London Journal. A forthcoming article in Women's History Review explores the architecture and literature of early women's colleges.

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her books include a monograph (British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890–1990), exhibition catalogues (Gender and the London Theatre, 1880–1920; and Facing the Late Victorians), co-edited essay collections (Michael Field and Their World; and Legacies of the Comfort Women of WWII), and co-authored exhibition catalogues (The Yellow Book; England in the 1890s; and England in the 1880s).