Issue 4.1 (Spring 2008)

Contributor Biographies

Amy D’Antonio is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Baby’s Birthright: Infant Feeding, Inheritance, and the Individual in the Late- Victorian Novel.”

Lawton A. Brewer is currently completing his doctorate under the direction of Dr. Paul Schmidt at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. His area of interest encompasses the fiction of the Edwardian and late Victorian period, with a focus on economic concerns and class. At conferences, he has presented papers on children in Dickens, Calvinism in Defoe, and sexual masochism in Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night.  His submission on “George Gissing’s Manifesto” reflects the area of research that will most likely inform his dissertation. Mr. Brewer has taught in several colleges as an adjunct and full time instructor, and he has served as Academic Dean at career schools in Rhode Island, Georgia, and Tennessee. Currently, Mr. Brewer is a First Year Writing Instructor at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.

Shanyn Fiske is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden.  Her book, Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination, is forthcoming in 2008 from Ohio University Press.

Anna Maria Jones is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches Victorian literature and critical theory. She is the author of Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Ohio State University Press, 2007). Her articles have appeared (or will appear) in Novel, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.

Iveta Jusová is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Literature and Director of Comparative Women’s Studies in Europe at Antioch College.  Her book, The New Woman and the Empire, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2005.  She has also published articles on late-nineteenth-century women writers and actresses in ELT, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Social Text, Slavic and East European Journal, Theatre History Studies, and other journals.

Maria LaMonaca is Associate Professor of English at Columbia College in South Carolina.  She is the author of Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (forthcoming from Ohio State UP, June 2008).  Her articles on Victorian literature, women authors and religion can be found in Women’s Writing, Studies in the Novel, Victorians Institute Journal, and Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Dianne Sachko Macleod is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of California at Davis.  Her book, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History by the American Philosophical Society and voted best book in nineteenth-century studies by the Historians of British Art (U.S.A.).  She has also co-edited a collection of essays, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (1998; Japanese translation forthcoming in 2008).  Her most recent book, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, will be published later this year by the University of California Press.

Patricia A. Matthew, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University, specializes in the history of the novel and nineteenth-century Romantic-era fiction.  Recent work includes an essay in Women’s Writing (“Biography and Mary Wollstonecraft in Adeline Mowbray and Valperga”) and a special issue of Romantic Pedagogy Commons (“Novel Prospect: Teaching Romantic-Era Fiction”), which she co-edited with Miriam L. Wallace.  She is currently working on a book-length study of genre and disease in nineteenth-century literature.

Kathleen A. Miller is a graduate student at the University of Delaware. She completed her Masters degree in May 2007 and is currently working towards her Ph.D. Her major literary interests include nineteenth-century British literature, women’s writing, and the gothic imagination. She has articles on Charlotte Brontë and L.M. Montgomery. Her forthcoming publications focus on Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and children’s biographies of Florence Nightingale.

Susan Morgan is Distinguished Professor of English at Miami University.  She has published extensively on the literature of empire.  Previous publications include Place Matters: Gendered Geography of Victorian Women's Travel Writings about Southeast Asia (Rutgers University Press, 1996) and Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1989). Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of “The King and I” Governess will be published in 2008 by the University of California Press.

Louise Penner is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses in Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities. She is currently completing a book entitled Nightingale and the Novelists: Victorian Medical Epistemologies.

John Plotz is Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at Brandeis University.  He is the author of The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (University of California Press, 2000) and Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton University Press, 2008).  His current project is tentatively titled “A History of Antisocialism, Mill to Arendt.”

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.  She has written about gender, sexuality, and popular fiction in Victorian literature and culture, and is currently at work on a book on penny dreadfuls and radical politics.

Jonathan Smith is Professor of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.  He is the author of Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Julia Straub obtained her PhD in 2007 from the University of Berne, Switzerland, where she is currently working as a post-doctoral assistant in American literature. She was a visiting PhD-student at the University of York, UK, from 2004-2006, investigating the reception of Dante in the Victorian period, especially the representation of the figure of Beatrice in literature and painting.

Kate Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.  She has published on: the Post Office and nineteenth-century communication networks; Victorian food and culture; lesbian poetics and queer theory.