Issue 14.2 (Summer 2018)

Contributor Biographies

Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, and Associate Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA) at Middlesex University. She completed her PhD at Warwick in 2016 on the female consumer of dress in the eighteenth-century. She currently researches material culture, consumers, and patriotism.

Katie Faulkner is an associate lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art and at Arcadia University in London. She is also widening participation and academic skills coordinator at The Courtauld. She is currently working on a book project on the boundaries between sculpture and performance in the nineteenth century and also has forthcoming publications focusing on sculpture and the decorative arts. In January 2019 she will take up a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art. 

Freya Gowrley is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on visual and material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and North America. Her monograph, Domestic Space in Britain, c.1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability & Emotion is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. She has held fellowships at Yale Centre for British Art, the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin), and in 2019 will be a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Postdoctoral Fellow.

Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on gender, the body and material culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (2004) and The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012). Her forthcoming book, The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

Kellie Holzer is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Women & Gender Studies at Virginia Wesleyan University. Her scholarship focuses on the British Empire, Victorian ideas about marriage and the family, matrimonial advertising, and nineteenth-century periodicals. She has published essays and book reviews in Victorians Institute Journal, South Asian Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Victorian Review.

Chloe Northrop is an Associate Professor of History at Tarrant County College. She received her PhD from the University of North Texas. Her dissertation, “Fashioning Creole Society in Eighteenth-Century British Jamaica,” was on the sentimental exchanges of fashionable goods in the British Atlantic World.

Aurélie Petiot is a lecturer in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century History of Art at Paris Nanterre University. Her publications include In the Frame: Gert van Lon, C. R. Ashbee, and the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, with Jean Michel Massing (The Burlington Magazine, 2012) and  Morris, Ashbee and Lethaby in Picardy:  Educational aspects of touring and sketching Gothic architecture for the Arts and Crafts Movement (British Art Journal 2011-2012). Her research now focuses on the Arts and Crafts movement in colonial Britain, studying issues of gender, race and education. She is currently writing a monograph on the Pre-Raphaelites in French.

Maya Wassell Smith is a collaborative doctoral candidate at National Maritime Museum and Cardiff University, researching “Sailor Art: Maritime Making in the Long Nineteenth Century”. She has engaged with, researched and theorised objects within academia, while studying History of Design and Material Culture at University of Brighton, and through curatorial and collections management work in museums. This has included London Borough of Newham Collections, Leeds Museums and Art Galleries and Brunel’s SS Great Britain among others. Her broad research interests centre on material culture and its connection to socio-cultural, vocational and industrial histories, including emotional objects, materiality and gender.

Clare Stainthorp is the 2017/18 Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow at Cardiff University (sponsored by BAVS and BARS). Her monograph on poet, philosopher, and student of science Constance Naden is forthcoming with Peter Lang, having won their 2017 Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century Studies. An article about her discovery of Naden’s adolescent notebooks is forthcoming Victorian Poetry (2018). She has also published in Victorian Literature and Culture and Literature Compass. Stainthorp is currently developing a project on late-nineteenth-century freethought periodicals, thus far supported by a 2017 Curran Fellowship from the Research Society of Victorian Periodical.

Tamara S. Wagner obtained her PhD from Cambridge University and is currently Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her books include Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 (2010) and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004), as well as edited collections on Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth-Century (2007), Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009), Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2011), and Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014). Wagner’s current projects include a study of Victorian narratives of failed emigration and a special issue on the nineteenth-century Pacific Rim for Victorian Literature and Culture.

Penelope Wickson is Head of History of Art at St Mary’s School, Calne. She completed her AHRC funded PhD at the University of Birmingham on the Macchiaioli’s images of female domestic textile production during the Italian Risorgimento. She has held a School Teacher Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and currently researches materiality, gender and the representation of fashion and textiles in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian art.

Elizabeth Honor Wilder is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. from Reed College and an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation uncovers the distinctly aesthetic stakes of the Victorian novel’s intense investment in domestic pleasure.