Current Officers & Board Members

Research interests: Victorian newspaper journalism; nineteenth-century British fiction; book and print culture history; digital humanities 

Selected publications: “The News Machine: Textual Form and Information Function in the London Times, 1785-1885” (Book History 2016); “Genre, ‘Distant Reading,’ and the Goals of Periodicals Research” (Victorian Periodicals Review 2015); “Reflections on 20,000 Victorian Newspapers: ‘Distant Reading’ The Times Using The Times Digital Archive” (Journal of Victorian Culture 2012); The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (University of Virginia Press, 2009); “Anatomy of a ‘Nine Days’ Wonder’: Sensational Journalism in the Decade of the Sensation Novel” (Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, 2004); “Who Invented the ‘Leading Article’? Reconstructing the History and Prehistory of a Victorian Newspaper Genre” (Media History 1999); “Mentor and Sibyl: Journalism and the End(s) of Apprenticeship in George Eliot” (Victorians Institute Journal 1998); “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and mid-Victorian theories of journalism” (Victorian Studies 1997)

Research Interests: Victorian women’s writing; sexuality; gender-based violence; romance

Selected Publications: co-editor, New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions (SUNY Press, 2026); “Reproduction without Women: Demothering the Biological in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction” (SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2026); “A Matter of Practicality: Mary Prince and Abolitionist Gaslighting,” Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice (SUNY, 2026); “Pornography and Obscenity,” Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature (2026); “The Fall of Anthropos: Time and the Trilobite in Victorian Literature” (Victorians, 2025); “Sexual Reproduction,” Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature (2024); “Cancel Jane? Jane Eyre, Romance, and the Lure of White Feminism” (Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2023); “Rescuing the Magdalen: Aurora Leigh as Reform Worker” (Women’s Writing, 2020); “Daniel Deronda, Marital Rape, and the End of Reproduction” (Victorian Review, 2017)

Research Interests: Victorian literature and culture; music and literature; women’s studies; digital humanities

Selected Publications: Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017); The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Ashgate, 2000; Routledge, 2016); editor, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Ashgate, 2000; Routledge, 2016); co-editor, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2013)

Digital Humanities: founder and co-director, Sounding Victorian; co-founder and co-director, Tennyson’s Archive: Digitising the Work of the Tennysons, Plural; PI, Sounding Tennyson; co-PI, Tennyson (Cambridge Digital Library)

Research Interests:  Research Interests: Lovesickness and Victorian ideals of femininity; alcoholism and ideas of class; race and empire; photographs and sexuality

Research Interests: the Victorian novel; neo-Victorianism; realism; character; gender and sexuality; East Asian Anglophone literature

Selected Publications: “Introduction: Novel Futures beyond Times of Crisis” (co-authored with Tara MacDonald, Studies in the Novel, 2023); “The Victorian Novel’s Future in Never Let Me Go” (Studies in the Novel, 2023); “From ‘Souvenirs’ to ‘Recollections’: Amelia Opie and the Practice of Self-Translation” (European Romantic Review, 2018); co-host of Narrative for Social Justice podcast

Research Interests: book history and material culture; nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustration and design; the novel and reception history

Selected Publications: co-author, “Using Plurilingual Heuristics to Reframe the Development of Textual Fluency in Multilingual Composition” (Composition Forum, forthcoming); blog posts, “Triple-Deckers and Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England,” and “Collecting Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England” (IUB Libraries Blogs, 2025); digital project, “Mapping Swell’s Metropolis: Using Special Collections to Explore 1840s London Nightlife” (ArcGIS Story Maps, 2024)

Research Interests: Victorian literature and music; Victorian children’s hymns

Selected Publications: British Hymn Books for Children, 1800-1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Ashgate, 2016); Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio, 2002)

Research Interests: Perceptions of the city and urban life in Britain 18th-20th centuries; 19th-century sonic landscape

Selected Publications: An Artisan Intellectual: James Carter and the Rise of Modern Britain, 1792-1853 (Louisiana State University Press, 2016); “The Urbanization of James Carter: Autobiography, Migration, and the Urban-Rural Divide in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Rural-Urban Relationships in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2016); “The Political Economy of the Street and Its Discontents: Beggars and Pedestrians in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London” (Cultural and Social History, 2015); “A Micrometer for Empire: How a Nineteenth-Century Tailor was – and was not – an Absent-Minded Imperialist” (History, 2015)

Research interests: Victorian and early-twentieth-century British literature and culture; humor; music; book history, print culture (periodicals, sheet music), and reception history; reflection and engineering education

Selected publications: The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); “Out With It, as the Subeditor Said to the Novel: Wellerisms and the Humor of Excerption” (Victorian Periodicals Review 2017); “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book: Humor, Mediation and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson” The Lion and the Unicorn 2014); “‘This Particularly Rapid, Unintelligible Patter’: Patter Songs and the Word-Music Relationship” (The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan, 2009)

Research Interests: Rural and frontier life, medicine, aristocracy, philanthropy, empire

Selected Publications: “The Decline and Fall of the Lady Bountiful? Empire, Adaptation, and Philanthropy,” The British Aristocracy and the Modern World (British Academy/Oxford University Press, forthcoming); “Kynynmound [née Grey], Mary Caroline Elliot-Murray-, Countess of Minto (1858–1940), Courtier, Vicereine, and Nursing Association and Hospital Founder” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2019); “Ward [née Gurney], Rachel Anne, Countess of Dudley (1867–1920), Nursing Association and Hospital Founder and Vicereine of Ireland” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2019)

Research Interests: Historical music theory; late nineteenth-century operetta; imagery in music publishing

Selected Publications: co-editor, Genre Without Borders: Reassessing Operetta (Routledge, 2023); “A Star is Born: The Travesti Protagonist from Chabrier to Hahn” (Genre Without Borders, 2023); “How Theocritus Sang: Eleanor Everest Freer’s Sonnets from the Portuguese” (Women’s Work in Music, 2021); “Playing it Straight”: Subverting Travesti Identities in Chabrier’s L’Étoile” (Music on Stage, 2018)

Research Interests: Poetry, prosody, and poetics of the long nineteenth century; history of science; gender and sexuality; race and empire

Selected Publications: co-editor, The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing (Cambridge, 2026); co-editor, The Verse Dramas of Michael Field: Decadent to Modern Theatre (Cambridge, 2026); co-editor, Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); “The Mathematics of Marriage: Augusta Webster’s Combinatory and Fractional Intimacy,” Love Among the Poets (Ohio UP, 2024); “Queer Social Counting and the Generational Transitions of Michael Field” (Women’s Writing, 2019); “‘Half-Poets’ and ‘Whole Democrats’: The Politics of Poetic Aggregation in Aurora Leigh” (Victorian Poetry, 2018); “James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night and the Forms of Secularist Congregation” (Victorian Periodicals Review, 2016)

Research Interests: Nineteenth-century British fiction; nineteenth-century periodicals; gender studies; book and print culture history; digital humanities; pedagogy and teaching practices

Selected publications: The Periodical Poetry Index: A Research Database of Poetry in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (co-director with Natalie M. Houston and April Patrick); “Introduction: Periodical Pedagogy Today: Digital Methods, Undergraduate Research, Collaboration, and Expanding the Field” (Victorian Periodicals Review, 2024); “‘An honest bargain?’ Transatlantic Marriage, Domestic Violence, and Garden Restoration in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle (1906)” (Women’s Writing, 2024); “Illustrated Poetry in Belgravia: An Exploration in Pedagogy and Collaborative Research” (co-authored with Mason Patterson; Victorian Periodicals Review 2021); “‘Afford[ing] me a Place:’ Recovering the Poetry of Felicia Hemans, Caroline Bowles, Margaret Holford Hodson, Catherine Godwin, and Eliza Hamilton in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” (The Edinburgh History of Victorian Women’s Print Media in Britain, 1830-1900, 2019); “Doctor Who and the Neo-Victorian Christmas Serial Tradition” (Neo-Victorian Studies, 2018); “Bibliographic Databases and ‘The Golden Stream’: Constructing the Periodical Poetry Index” (co-authored with Natalie M. Houston and April Patrick; Victorian Review, 2012); “Gender Play ‘At Our Social Table’: The New Domesticity in the Cornhill and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters” (The Gaskell Society Journal, 2008)

Selected Publications: “Opera and British Choral Culture: Verdi’s Requiem in London 1,” Opera outside the Box (Routledge, 2022); “New Interpretations of Paganini, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms” (Early Music, 2022); “Pitched Battles? Vocal Health and the British Pitch Debate in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Symphonism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Brepols, 2020)

Research Interests: 19th-century fiction and poetry; women’s writing; dance; performance studies; book history; critical studies in higher education

Selected Publications: Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (Pickering & Chatto, 2012); Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman (Cambridge, 2009); co-author with Laura Koppes Bryan, Shaping Work-Life Culture in Higher Education (Routledge, 2015); editor, Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Palgrave, 2008); co-editor with Margaret D. Stetz, Michael Field and Their World (Rivendale, 2007)

Research Interests: Victorian musical life and its commerce; concert history, audiences, listening, and music appreciation (especially in London); the Christmas carol in Victorian Cornwall; the culture around the violin; working-class music-making

Selected Publications: Violin Culture in Britain, 1870-1930: Music-Making, Society, and the Popularity of Stringed Instruments (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); co-editor of The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930 (Boydell, 2016); author of The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Boydell, 2007); co-editor of Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford, 2000)

Research Interests: Victorian poetry; William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites; working-class literature

Selected Publications: History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris (Ohio State, 2015); Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain: An Anthology (Broadview, 2008); The Design of the Earthly Paradise (Edwin Mellen, 1990); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Critical Source Study (Mouton, 1976); Editor of William Morris Archive

Research Interests: Race and empire; postcolonial studies; cultural studies

Selected Publications: States of Emergency: Essays on Culture and Politics (Indiana, 2013); Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Cornell, 2011); Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2010); Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races (Cornell, 2003); The Reading Lesson: Mass Literacy as Threat in British Fiction (Indiana, 1998); Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (Routledge, 1990); Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Cornell, 1988)

Research Interests: the Victorian novel; religion and literature; secularism; gender studies; William Makepeace Thackeray; Charlotte and Emily Brontë

Selected Publications: Thackeray and Women (Northern Illinois, 1995)

Research Interests: Victorian visual culture and the Victorian press; Indian culture under the British Raj; life writings in Britain and India (autobiographies and biographies)

Selected Publications: The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Life Writings in Britain, 1870-1910 (Cambridge, 2003; rev. ed. ppr. 2012). Edited collections — The Political Economy of Art (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2008); Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (Mapin, 2012); Transculturation in British Art, 1770-1930 (Ashgate, 2012); Imperial Co-Histories (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2003). Co-editor with L. Hughes, Replication in the Long 19th Century: Re-Makings and Reproductions (Edinburgh, 2018); with J. DelPlato, Orientalism, Eroticism, and Modern Visuality in Global Culture (Ashgate, 2016); with L. Brake, Encounters in the Victorian Press (Palgrave, 2004); with D. S. Macleod, Orientalism Transposed (Ashgate, 1998)

Research Interests: Victorian fiction and poetry; literature and ethics; narrative empathy; psychology of reading

Selected Publications: “How Narrative Relationships Overcome Empathic Biases: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Empathy Across Social Difference” (Poetics Today, 2012); “The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy: Reconceiving Dickens’s Realism” (Narrative, 2008)

Research Interests: Victorian culture, history, and science; women’s writing; life writing

Selected Publications: Editor of Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities (Routledge, 2005); Co-editor of Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Massachusetts, 1996)

Research Interests: Victorian literature and culture with special interests in historical media studies (including poetry and print culture, periodicals, and serial fiction); gender and women’s studies; transnationality

Selected Publications: The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, 2010); Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio, 2005); The Manyfacèd Glass: Tennyson’s Dramatic Monologues (Ohio, 1987). Co-author with Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell’s Work (Virginia, 1999) and The Victorian Serial (Virginia, 1991). Editor, Novellas and Shorter Fiction: Cousin Phillis and other Tales from All the Year Round and the Cornhill Magazine, 1859–64, Vol. 4, Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Pickering & Chatto, 2006). Co-editor, Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture (Edinburgh, 2015); A Feminist Reader: Feminist Thought from Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge, 2013)

Research Interests: The British music festival; sight-singing techniques; the intersection of choral singing and moral reform movements

Selected Publications: Co-author with Steven E. Plank of Historical Dictionary of English Music, ca. 1400-1958 (Scarecrow, 2011); Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (Cambridge, 2009); Elgar’s Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative (Ashgate, 2002)

Research Interests: 19th-century British travel, empire, and childhoods; periodical culture; pedagogy and race; public humanities; state of the profession

Selected Publications: “Gestures of Connection: Victorian Technologies of Photography and ‘Invisible’ Mothering” (Victorian Studies, 2023); “Picturing the Villain: Image-Making and the Indian Uprising” (Victorian Studies, 2021); “Travel Writing,” Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2019); “Fashioning the Spectacle of Japan: Isabella Bird and the Periodical Press,” The Edinburgh History of Victorian Women’s Print Media, 1830-1900 (2019); Editor, Children and Empire, 4 Vols. (Routledge, 2012); Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes (Toronto, 2010).

Research Interests: Victorian and post-colonial history

Selected Publications: “Ethnicity as Marker in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia (Ohio State, 2013); “‘A Strange Incongruity’: The Imaginary India of the International Exhibitions” (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2012)