Issue 11.2 (Summer 2015)

Contributor Biographies

Veronica Alfano is a Faculty Fellow in the English Department at the University of Oregon, specializing in Victorian poetry, lyric theory, and gender studies. She has published articles and book chapters on Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Housman, and Robert Browning; along with Andrew Stauffer, she is co-editor of the essay collection Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is completing a monograph titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory, which explores the links between mnemonic form and cultural nostalgia.

Ellen Bell has been a practicing artist for over twenty years. Her work features in both public and private collections in the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Australia and the USA. In 2002 the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased a piece for their print collection. Though initially trained as an illustrator at Manchester Metropolitan University, under such luminaries as David Hughes and Jake Abrams, the current focus of Bell’s practice is public art installation. Bell has held various associate lecturer posts, such as at Anglia Ruskin University, teaching on a variety of art and design programs. Since gaining an MA in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University in 2014, Bell has been a regular contributor to the New Welsh Review.

Nancy Marck Cantwell is Associate Professor and Department Chair of English at Daemen College in Amherst, New York, where she teaches British literature. She has published articles on narrative technique in the works of George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and her recent conference papers address the novels of Bram Stoker, Maria Edgeworth, and George Eliot. Her current research includes articles on narrative technique in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the gendered and racialized aspects of dress in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the Irish female detective, and nationalism in the works of Scottish novelist Susan Ferrier. She is presently preparing a book-length study, Sherlock Holmes and Empire.

Laura Engel is an Associate Professor of eighteenth-century British literature and drama at Duquesne University. Recent publications include: Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (Palgrave Pivot Series, 2014); Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Ohio State UP, 2011); Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830, co-edited with Elaine McGirr (Bucknell UP, 2014). She is currently at work on a new book tentatively titled: The Archival Tourist: Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory, 1780-1915.

Kate Holterhoff is a PhD Candidate in Carnegie Mellon University’s Literary and Cultural Studies program. She is the author of “The Reception and History of Charles Darwin's Hypothesis of Pangenesis” (The Journal of the History of Biology, 2014); “Beauty As a Terministic Screen In Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man” (Victorian Network, 2010); and “Liminality and Power in Bram Stoker’s Jewel of Seven Stars” for Critical Essays on Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction from Wollstonecraft to Stoker (McFarland, 2009). She is also the editor of Visual Haggard: The Illustration Archive (www.visualhaggard.org), a digital archive intended to preserve, centralize, and improve access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard.

Nicole Lobdell earned her PhD in English from the University of Georgia in 2013. Currently a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she is at work on a book about hoarding and nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is also writing an article for Rock and Romanticism, an upcoming anthology, on the poetry of William Blake reimagined and set to the sounds of Appalachian folk, blues, and southern gospel music. She is co-editing a new critical edition of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, under contract with Broadview Press, and an upcoming special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the theme “Mobilities,” featuring papers from the INCS 2015 conference in Atlanta, which she co-organized.

Kimberly Rhodes is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Drew University. She is the author of Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2008) and, most recently, “Double Take: Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000)” for The Afterlife of Ophelia, co-edited by Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and “Archetypes and Icons: Materialising Victorian Womanhood in 1970s Feminist Art” for Neo-Victorian Studies (2013).

Nancy Rose Marshall is Professor of art history at UW-Madison, where she specializes in Victorian art and visual culture. Co-author of the exhibition catalogue James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love (Yale Center for British Art, 1999), Marshall is currently working on a monograph on the art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  She has most recently completed a book on the construction of imperialist metropolitan modernity in fine art, entitled City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for Yale University Press, 2012). Growing out of research for this book is a new project on Victorian representations of fire in paint and print.

Patricia Smith Scanlan earned her PhD in Art History at Indiana University, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture. In 2005, she received a Henry Luce Foundation American Art Dissertation Research Award; in 2006, she was selected as a recipient of a Luce Foundation/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art for the writing of her dissertation, “‘God-gifted girls’: Women Illustrators, Gender, Class, and Commerce in American Visual Culture, 1885-1925.” An independent art historian in Chicago, Tricia serves as a seminar instructor at the Newberry Library and other institutions, an art education consultant, and an adjunct lecturer at the Art Institute. She edited and contributed to Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and is at work on a book-length project based on her dissertation.

Adam Sonstegard completed his PhD at Washington University in St Louis, and is currently an associate professor at Cleveland State University. He is the author of Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905 (Alabama, 2014). He has published on gender and sexuality in Arizona Quarterly and Biography, and in The Brokeback Book: Essays on the Groundbreaking Film (Nebraska, 2011) and Queer Love in Film and Television (Palgrave, 2013). He has written on the intersections of literary and graphic arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Criticism, and in We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality (Kent State, 2010).

Susan Walton’s first degrees were in History, but she gained a PhD in the Department of English at the University of Hull in 2006. She is now an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of Hull. She has written a book, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Ashgate, 2010), and published articles on various aspects of Victorian history and literature. Her main research focuses on nineteenth-century conservative women writers and scholars.