Issue 8.1 (Spring 2012)

Contributor Biographies

Julie E. Fromer is the author of A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England (2008) and numerous articles exploring the connection between consumption and identity in Victorian fiction and prose, including “‘Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant’: Representations of English National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea” in Victorian Literature and Culture (2008) and “ ‘Smoking and Pondering’: Masculinity and Domesticity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife” in the anthology Consuming for Pleasure: Selected Essays on Popular Fiction (2000). She currently teaches nineteenth-century British literature at Ithaca College.

Georgina O’Brien Hill is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. Her PhD examined George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, Florence Marryat and the periodical press. She has published on the work of Florence Marryat and Charles Reade and has guest-edited a special issue for Women’s Writing with Dr Valerie Fehlbaum on Ella Hepworth Dixon. Her research interests include the Victorian periodical press, women writers, sensation fiction, spiritualism, and the fictional representation of women professionals.She is currently writing a book on the work of the woman editor at mid-century.

Emily M. Hinnov earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of New Hampshire in 2005. She is currently Lecturer of Humanities at Boston University, and has held appointments as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University and Assistant Professor of English and women’s studies at Bowling Green State University, Firelands College. In these positions, Hinnov taught literary modernism, composition, gender studies, film studies, world literature, and British literature from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Her book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years, was published by Susquehanna University Press in 2009. She has published on Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Tina Modotti. Hinnov’s forthcoming publications focus on subjects ranging from being a Generation X academic to gender and illness in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. She is currently working on an edited collection titled Communal Modernisms: Teaching Literary and Cultural Texts in the Twenty-first Century College Classroom.

Meaghan Malone is a graduate student in English Language and Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her current SSHRC-funded research analyzes masculinity and the gaze in Jane Austen’s novels. She has published on Austen as well as depictions of prostitution in nineteenth-century American literature in At the Edge.

Danielle Nielsen is an Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky.  Her teaching and research interests include colonial and post-colonial discourse, literacy, and rhetoric, Victorian literature and print culture, and gender studies.  Her current research project Patriotic Literacies: Colonial Spectacles, their Texts, and the Development of an Imperial Citizenry explores the relationship between early twentieth-century colonial texts, genre theory, and the education of imperial citizens.

Sarah N. MacDonald is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Her main research interest is working women’s life writing. She lives with her husband and one-year-old daughter in northeast Ohio while finishing her degree.

Jennifer Phegley is a Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she teaches nineteenth-century literature. She has written numerous books and articles including Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (2004) and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (2011). She is also co-editor of Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons From the Victorian Age to the Present (2005), Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2010), and Transatlantic Sensations (2011). 

Talia Schaffer is a professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Novel Craft: Fiction and the Victorian Domestic Handicraft (2011); The Forgotten Female Aesthetes; Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (2001); co-editor with Kathy A. Psomiades of Women and British Aestheticism (1999); editor of Lucas Malet's 1901 novel, The History of Sir Richard Calmady (2003); and editor of Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2006). She has published widely on noncanonical women writers, material culture, popular fiction, aestheticism, and late-Victorian texts. Her new book project explores alternative models of Victorian marriage.

Jessica Straley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Utah. She has published articles about the intersections between Victorian fiction and science, including “Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins’s Experiment in Heart and Science” in Nineteenth-Century Literature and “Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and the Theory of Recapitulation” in Victorian Studies. She is currently completing her book manuscript, entitled “How the Child Lost its Tail: Evolutionary Theory, Victorian Pedagogy, and the Development of Children’s Literature, 1860-1920,” that explores how nineteenth-century theories of the child’s animality informed, and indeed formed, the modern genre of children’s literature.

Cheryl A. Wilson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Baltimore.  She is the author of Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman (Cambridge UP, 2009) and Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming 2012), editor of Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Palgrave, 2008), and co-editor with Margaret D. Stetz of Michael Field and Their World (Rivendale, 2007).