Issue 7.2 (Summer 2011)

Contributor Biographies

Dr. Éadaoin Agnew is a lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University, London. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A. at Queen's University, Belfast and studied for her undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Dublin. Currently, her areas of interest are nineteenth-century travel writing, popular Victorian literature and nineteenth-century women's representations of nature. She has published articles on Lady Hariot Dufferin, Vicereine of India (1884-1888) and continues to work on Lady Dufferin's letters and photographs from India.

Stephanie Eggermont is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Eggermont's dissertation project is entitled 'A Formal and Thematic Analysis of the Contribution of Women Writers to the Birth of the Modern Short Story in Britain (1880-1910)'. The project seeks to analyze the interaction between the development of the modern short story and the emergence of the New Woman, in late nineteenth century Britain. Eggermont examines the short stories of fin de siècle woman writers such as Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, Ella D'Arcy and Sarah Grand, relying on short story theory and narrative theory on the one hand, and on women's studies and gender studies on the other.

Barbara T. Gates is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies Emerita at the University of Delaware.  She is author of Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton, 1988), Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago, 1998), and numerous essays and reviews.  Her edited works include Critical Essays on Charlotte Brontë (G. K. Hall, 1990), the Journal of Emily Shore (Virginia, 1991), Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, ed. with Ann B. Shteir (Wisconsin, 1997), an anthology of nature writing, In Nature’s Name (Chicago, 2002), and editions of Victorian science writers Arabella Buckley (Thoemmes, 2003) and Eliza Brightwen (Thoemmes, 2004).  In 2000, Professor Gates was named Distinguished Senior Scholar of the Year by the AAUW.

Paula Alexandra Guimarães is Auxiliary Professor at the Department of English and North-American Studies of University of Minho (Braga), Portugal, where she lectures English Poetry and Language to graduate and postgraduate courses. She wrote her Masters dissertation on The Resolution of Elisabeth Gaskell’s Social Novel and her Doctoral dissertation on The Issues of Vision and Creation in the Poetry of the Brontës. Her areas of teaching and research include the lyric produced during the Romantic, Victorian and Modern periods, with emphasis on women’s writing and its connections with the male canon. She is mainly interested in literary relationships and the issues of ‘dialogue’, ‘influence’ and ‘intertextualities’. She has published many scholarly articles and book chapters, and presented several academic papers on Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Gaskell, the three Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mathilde Blind, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne and modern women poets such as Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, in both national and international conferences (U.K., U.S.A., Canada, Austria and Belgium). She presently develops research on the interartistic relations between poetry and music and has co-organised an International Conference on ‘Music Discourse Power’ in Portugal. She is currently working on a major book project and website for postgraduate use, Traditions, Revolutions and Evolutions of Women’s Poetry in England: Reading /Writing the Other.

Dr. Cecile Kandl is an Associate Professor of English at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA. Her teaching and research interests include Nineteenth-Century British Literature, British Modernism, and Popular Culture.   She has  published short fiction as well as interviews in journals such as The Bend, Icarus, New Pathways and Grimoire and has presented scholarly papers at institutions such as the University of Toronto, The University of California, Berkeley, Otterbein College, Boise State University and the University of London.

Lizzie Harris McCormick is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.  She earned her Ph.D. and M. Phil. at the Graduate Center - CUNY and her B.A. at Bennington College.   Her research interests lie in exploring the relationships between fin de siècle psychological writing – especially its conceptions of “pathologicial” imaginative functions like hysteria or hebephrenia - and the era’s fantastic literature.  Her current research project, Daydream Believers: Female Imagination in the Women’s Fin de Siècle Fantastic Fiction (1880-1900), focuses on women’s use of ‘fantastic’ genres to complicate and challenge the prevailing gendered pathologies of imagination. It asks what new representations of female creativity were made possible by non-realistic and narratively flexible modes like supernatural thrillers, fairy tales and ghost stories. 

Beth Newman teaches at Southern Methodist University, where she is an associate professor of English and the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program.  She has published Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Ohio University Press, 2004), and has also produced editions of Wuthering Heights (Broadview, 2007) and of Jane Eyre (Bedford, 1996). She has published articles on Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and Henry James, and on language and vulgarity in the nineteenth century, and on Alice Meynell and Walter Pater.

Ellen Rosenman is a Provost’s Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship (Louisiana State, 1986), Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Cornell, 2003), and co-editor of Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal (Ohio State, 2008). She is currently working on a book about penny dreadfuls and working class social imaginaries.

Richard Somerset is a lecturer at the Université de Nancy. He is primarily interested in the concept of historicity in the nineteenth century as manifested in the fields of natural science, historiography and literature. He has published articles on pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought and evolutionary popularisation in France and in Britain, the historiography of Thomas Carlyle and Jules Michelet, ‘prehistoric fiction’, and the scientific link connecting progressive liberalism to imperialism, as well as pieces on specific authors such as George Eliot, William Morris, Bram Stoker, Honoré de Balzac, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Conan Doyle. Most recently he has produced a number of articles, in both English and French, relating to the popularisation of evolutionary theory at the end of the nineteenth century, concentrating on the use of narrative devices and visual aids as a way of naturalising or contesting evolutionary processes. He is also working more generally on popular ‘Evolutionary Epics’ and hopes to publish a monograph on the subject.

Jesse Oak Taylor is ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He has published articles on authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Jim Corbett, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, and on various aspects of global environmentalism. Jesse Oak is at work on a book titled The Invention of Smog: Climate, Atmosphere, and the Metropolitan Novel from Charles Dickens to Virginia Woolf, and is co-author of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to the Scale of Global Change (Oxford, 2011).

Kate Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, queer theory and food studies.  She is the author of Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal and Victorian Letters (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Kari J. Winter, Professor of American Studies at SUNY at Buffalo, is the author of Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (Georgia, 1992, 1995, 2010) and The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader (Georgia, 2011).  She prepared the first new edition in 200 years of the 1810 transatlantic slave narrative, The Blind African Slave: or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jeffrey Brace (Wisconsin, 2005), with a long historical introduction, annotations, and appendixes of related documents.   She has published articles on and teaches courses in literatures and histories of the Atlantic world from the eighteenth century to the present.