Issue 17.1 (Spring 2021)

Contributor Biographies

Kimberly Cox (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English at Chadron State College where she teaches courses in British literature, gender and sexuality, multiethnic literature, the novel, and composition. She received her Ph.D. in Victorian literature and her graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Stony Brook University. She served as co-managing editor of Victorian Literature and Culture from 2016–18. Her work on hands, haptics, and sexuality has appeared in Victorian Network, Victorians: Journal of Culture and Literature, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Her book, Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2021.

Lana L. Dalley (she/her/hers) is Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature, feminist literature, and feminist/gender theory. She is the co-editor of Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Her work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Women’s Writing, Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Poetry, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, among others. Most recently, she co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth Century Gender Studies entitled “Victorian Literature in the Age of #MeToo” (Summer 2020). She is currently finishing a monograph on representations of political economy and the family in nineteenth-century women’s writing and an anthology on women’s economic writing in the nineteenth century (under contract with Routledge).

Riya Das (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English at Prairie View A&M University, where she is a Mellon Faculty Support awardee for Spring 2021. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, gender, empire, and narrative form. Her article, “An Unsympathetic Network: Female Defiance as Narrative Force in Daniel Deronda,” recently appeared in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has also written for The Austin Chronicle. Her current book project on late Victorian literature and gender challenges traditional accounts of female solidarity as a driver of narrative and social success for women.

Carrie Dickison (she/her/hers) is Assistant Teaching Professor and Assistant Director of the Writing Program at Wichita State University, where she coordinates the online composition program and teaches courses in composition theory and nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Christa DiMarco (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she teaches art history. Her research focuses on Vincent van Gogh’s Paris period.

Shannon Draucker (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, NY. Her research and teaching focus on Victorian literature, gender and sexuality studies, music, and the history of science. Her book project, Sounding Bodies: Music, Physiology, and Queer Politics in Victorian Literature, argues that nineteenth-century scientific understandings of music’s effects on the human body fundamentally transformed the ways Victorian writers described desire, pleasure, and intimacy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, BRANCH, The Eudora Welty Review, Hybrid Pedagogy, and The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.

Helena Goodwyn (she/her/hers) is Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at Northumbria University. Her work has featured in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing, and the edited collections Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880-1921 (MUP) and Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan).

Christie Harner (she/her/hers) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Fellowship Advising. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between literature, science, and visual culture in the long nineteenth century. She has recently published on Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, in Victorian Literature and Culture; on Australian children’s literature and deep time; and on animal language and eco-temporalities in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books. She is currently a lead collaborator on a public humanities pedagogy project funded by the New England Humanities Consortium.

Gabrielle Kappes (she/her/hers) received her Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, The Picturesque and Its Decay: The Travel Writing and Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, examines how these writers formulate inquiries concerning political violence, ecological catastrophe, and personal trauma that cannot be measured or controlled by the picturesque. Other work includes the chapbook Homage to Leroi Jones & Other Early Works (2015) which presents previously unpublished writing from underground feminist author Kathy Acker. Her current research focuses on how digital pedagogies and social media platforms can be used as tools for student-centered writing and social advocacy. She teaches writing and literature at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly,and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter,and The New Engagement,as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

Alexandra L. Milsom (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. She has published essays in Keats-Shelley Journal, Studies in Romanticism, Literature Compass, and Persuasions, and has written about tourism and literature for The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rambling. Her book project The British Tourist and Catholic Emancipation reexamines the role of British Continental tourism in promoting and thwarting the cause of Catholic Emancipation in Great Britain and Ireland.

April Patrick (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Literature and University Director of Honors at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She teaches courses on British literature, poetry, children’s and young adult literature, medical humanities, digital humanities, and research methods. She is Co-Director of the Periodical Poetry Index, a research database of citations to poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals. Her recent publications cover the intersections of gender and class with experiences of illness, memorial writing in periodicals, methods for checking the Periodical Poetry Index, and models of collaboration in Victorian periodicals studies from the 1990s to today.

Bettina Tate Pedersen (she/her/hers) is Professor of Literature at Point Loma Nazarene University and former Chair of the Literature, Journalism, Writing, and Languages Department. She has lectured and published articles on pedagogy, British and Canadian women writers, feminism, and women’s studies. She has co-edited/authored, with Allyson Jule, Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia (Palgrave, 2006; 2008) and Facing Challenges: Feminism in Christian Higher Education and Other Places (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015). She is at work on a book entitled Feminism, Christianity, and Me. In recent years she has turned attention to her poetry, which has appeared in Whale Road Review and the San Diego Tribune. She lives in San Diego with her spouse and two sons.

Andrew Rimby (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. Candidate and queer activist at Stony Brook University researching nineteenth-century literature from a queer transatlantic perspective. He is the 2019 inaugural recipient of the Guiliano Global Fellowship, a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow, and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences. With Adam Katz, he co-anchors The Ivory Tower Boiler Room, a podcast about navigating academia during the pandemic. He is also the Associate Editor for the Watchung Review and a board member of the Walt Whitman Initiative.

Amanda Mingail Shubert (she/her/hers) is Associate Lecturer of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in Victorian literature and visual culture, pre-cinematic technology, and early film. Her essays are published or forthcoming in Victorian Studies and Victorian Literature and Culture. She is presently at work on a book that examines the rise of virtual entertainment in nineteenth-century British culture, from optical toys to the invention of moving pictures.

Doreen Thierauf (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan College where she teaches courses in British literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on women’s writing, sexuality, gender-based violence, and romance has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and The Journal of Popular Culture, among others. Thierauf has served as the Treasurer-Secretary of the British Women Writers Association since 2018.

Jessica R. Valdez (she/her/hers) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. She is currently working on a book-length project called Despots and Democrats: China and America in Nineteenth-Century British Literature that analyzes the intersecting imaginaries of the United States and China in nineteenth-century British literature. Her first book, Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel, came out with Edinburgh University in Press in 2020.

Talia M. Vestri (she/her/hers) is a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Writing Program at Northeastern University, having previously taught at Vassar College, College of the Holy Cross, and Boston University. Her writing on British Romanticism and nineteenth-century kinship, family, marriage, and queer studies has appeared in European Romantic Review, Persuasions On-Line, Keats-Shelley Journal, The Keats Letters Project, and the graduate caucus blog of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.