Issue 9.3 (Winter 2013)

Contributor Biographies

Alison Booth is Professor of English at University of Virginia, specializing in narrative, feminist studies in nineteenth-century literature, and digital humanities.  Her books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf; How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present; and “Homes and Haunts,” on transatlantic literary tourism, house museums, and biography.  A Fellow of ACLS and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, she directs the Collective Biographies of Women project.

Julia McCord Chavez is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin’s University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, Victorian print culture, serialization, gender studies, and the intersections of law and literature. Chavez has published articles on the gothic aspects of serial novels by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the pedagogical value of Victorian periodical reading, and the transatlantic publication of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native.  Most recently, she has co-authored two publications: a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on the topic of “Law and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England” with Katherine Gilbert, and an entry on “Serialization” for Oxford Bibliographies Online with Susan David Bernstein. Chavez is currently working on a book entitled “Victorian Wanderers and the Serial Form.”

Mary Jean Corbett is Professor of English and Affiliate of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. She is the author of Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women's Autobiographies (Oxford, 1992); Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: History, Politics, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge, 2000); and Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 2008). Her current research explores late-Victorian contexts for the life and writing of Virginia Woolf.

Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1988), co-editor with Paula Feldman of Voices and Countervoices: Romantic Women Writers (New England, 1995), Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997), and Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2012).  With Richard Sha, she co-directs the Romantic Circles Galley, an online series of exhibits with a searchable database. She has published widely on Romantic poetics, aesthetics, visual culture, and philosophy. Her current research projects include a book on Romantic futurity and a study of Romantic era color theory and practice.

Linda Claridge Middup was a part-time mature PhD student at the University of Warwick whilst also working part-time as a children’s worker for the Children and Family Education Service from 2002-2009. Her PhD examined several texts that were written by women for children between the years 1788-1888 (between the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life and the emergence of the literary concept of the ‘New Woman’). It argued that didactic authors used religious and moral education in their narratives to suggest a more nuanced vision of ‘femininity’ that challenged patriarchal and societal assumptions. She is now an Independent Scholar whose main research interests are close reading of female-authored didactic literature (including fairy tales), the literary subversion of patriarchal and societal constructions of femininity in children’s literature, and the close interrelationship between the empowerment of ‘femininity’ and proto-feminism during the long nineteenth century.

Jessie Reeder is a Ph.D. candidate (anticipated 2014) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation, The Forms of Informal Empire: Narrating Sovereignty, Community, and Subjugation in British and Latin American Relations, 1810-1900, examines the emergent structures of neocolonialism in the nineteenth century in terms of their narrative discursive forms. Her research interests include narrative and poetic form, social hierarchies, empire, travel, imagined communities that do not align with the nation, and social justice.

Anna Royal is an adjunct professor in English at Scottsdale Community College.  She received her MA from McGill University and MPhil from Cambridge University.  Her research interests include the interplay of domesticity and colonialism in the Victorian novel.  Other publications include “The Many Faces of Frances” in Brontë Studies and “Imagining Home at a Snail’s Pace in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night” in Transnational Literature. 

Nadia Valman is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2007), the co-editor of five collections of essays on the representation of Jews in British culture and, most recently Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Alicia Williams is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century British literature, history and theories of reading, and narrative. She is currently working on a project on seriality and the narrative logic of George Meredith’s Modern Love. She has published a review of Avrom Fleishman’s George Eliot’s Intellectual Life in the inaugural issue of Victoriographies.