Issue 8.2 (Summer 2012)

Contributor Biographies

Gregory Brennen is a postgraduate in English at the University of Exeter. He is currently completing a master’s thesis entitled “The Liberal Individual and the Victorian State: Encounters with State Power in Victorian Literature.” His research interests include Victorian literature and culture, liberalism and government in Victorian Britain, and intersections among politics, law, and literature.

Julia McCord Chavez is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington. She received her J.D., magna cum laude, from Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, and her Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic interests include nineteenth-century British literature, novel studies, gender studies, Victorian print culture, and the intersections of law and literature.  She has published articles on the gothic aspects of serial novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the pedagogical value of Victorian periodical reading, theories of happiness in Dickens’s novels, and the transatlantic publication of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Victorian Wanderers and the Serial Form.”

Colleen Fenno is an Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University Wisconsin.  Her research focuses primarily on nineteenth-century British literature, with a special interest in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley family.  She is also interested in women’s literature and has a forthcoming article in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature about contemporary British novelist Zadie Smith.

Katherine Gilbert is Director of Women and Gender Studies and Assistant Professor of English at Drury University. She received her M.A. from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. from The University of Wisconsin. She specializes in the Victorian period, and her current book project, Legal Personalities: The Mediating Work of the Lawyer in the Victorian Novel, examines the literary and ethical character of the lawyer in Victorian fiction as one that evokes the tense stand-off between advocates of the old feudal order and reformers eager to democratize and rationalize the nation-state. She was a winner in the 2010 Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop Paper Competition for “The Inequalities of Equity and the Search for an Ethical Professional in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House,” which appeared in a special issue of the Law and Humanities ejournal. Most recently, her article, “The Politics of Character: The Lawyers and Pompilia in Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book,” appeared in Victorian Poetry (Fall 2011).

Matthew Ingleby teaches at University College London, where he obtained his doctorate, which contributed to the Bloomsbury Project and was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He has published one article on William Morris and utopian Bloomsbury, another on Victorian building plots, and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Forthcoming are articles about George Crabbe, on Dickens and the Malthusian uncanny, and also an essay collection about G. K. Chesterton and the city, which he is co-editing with Matthew Beaumont. He is writing a monograph about the the role of nineteenth-century fiction in the production of the metropolitan locality of Bloomsbury.

Christine L. Krueger, professor of English at Marquette University, is author of Reading for the Law:  British Literary History and Gender Advocacy (2010).  She is currently writing a biography of the historian Mary Anne Everett Green.

Barbara Leckie is an Associate Professor cross-appointed in the English Department and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. She has published Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914 and is currently completing “Open Houses: The Architectural Idea, Poverty, and Victorian Print Culture, 1842-92” and “Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain: End of Century Assessments and New Directions” (an edited collection of primary documents on sanitary reform forthcoming with Pickering & Chatto).

Thad Logan teaches Victorian literature and culture at Rice University. She is the author of The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 2001). She was Pre-Raphaelite Studies Fellow at the University of Delaware in 2009; her current project, Rossetti’s Things, investigates material culture in the life and work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Clare McGlynn is a Professor of Law at Durham University in the UK where she specializes in feminist analyses of law and policy. She is currently being funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to investigate liberal justifications for pornography regulation, beginning with analysis of John Stuart Mill’s approach to both pornography and prostitution regulation. This work develops her already published work on current pornography laws. She is co-editor of Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice (2010) and Rethinking Rape Law: International and Comparative Perspectives (2010), as well as author of Families and the European Union: Law, Politics and Pluralism (2006) and The Woman Lawyer: Making The Difference (1998).

Elsie B. Michie is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her books include The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (2011), Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (1993), and Victorian Vulgarity (2009), co-edited with Susan David Bernstein. She has published widely on Victorian literature and is currently working on a book about Frances Milton Trollope’s impact on Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Harriet Beecher Stowe provisionally entitled Trollopizing the Canon.

Catherine Siemann has a Ph.D. in 19th century British Literature from Columbia University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. She is currently teaching as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at both John Jay College, CUNY and Cooper Union. Forthcoming publications include “Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards: Alice and the Anxiety of Law” in Law and Literature and “The Steampunk Social Problem Novel” in the essay collection, Steaming into a Victorian Future.

Marlene Tromp is Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies and Director of the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (SUNY, 2006) and The Private Rod: Sexual Violence, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (UP Virginia, 2000). She has also edited or co-edited and contributed to Fear and Loathing: Victorian Xenophobia (Ohio State UP, 2012), Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2007), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation (SUNY 2000). She has another book under review, Force of Habit: Life and Death on the Titanic, and is working on a new project on violence between sexual partners entitled Intimate Murder.

Danaya C. Wright is the Clarence J. TeSelle Professor of Law at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law.  Her principal areas of research are on the origins of English family law, particularly child custody and divorce reform.  She is currently working on a book on the origins of judicial interference in the family through the development of the Parens Patriae jurisdiction.  Her recent articles are on the original records of the 1858 divorce court.  She also writes in the area of trusts and estates, having recently completed two casebooks on the subject.  And she writes extensively about nineteenth century property law, particuarly railroad property rights and their conversion to recreational trails.  She teaches constitutional law, property, trusts and estates, and legal history.