Advisory Board Elections 2013
To vote, send an e-mail to navsa@purdue.edu. All votes must be received by March 9, 2013. You may choose ONE person in “Canadian (Open Category)”; ONE person in “American (Open Category)”; ONE person in "History (Open Category)”, ONE person for Graduate Representative: West, ONE person for Graduate Representative: East and ONE person for "Executive Secretary". The first three Advisory Board position are for three-year terms; the "Graduate Representative" position is for a one-year term. The Executive Secretary position is for a five-year term.
ADVISORY BOARD: CANADIAN
Alison Chapman
Alison Chapman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. She moved to Canada in 2006 after holding a Senior Lectureship at the University of Glasgow (where she also received her Ph.D. in 1996), and Lectureships at the University of Dundee and Sheffield Hallam University. She was the Snell Newlands Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and she has held fellowships at Princeton University Library and the Armstrong Browning Library. Her research concentrates on Victorian poetry, but she has published widely on Victorian literature and culture, and on topics as diverse as mesmerism, photography, children’s literature, and Anglo-Italian cultural politics. Currently, she is the Editor of the in-progress Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, which aims to index, image and code a representative sample of Victorian periodical poetry. She is also the Director of the Victorian Poetry Network, a hub for research on, news about, and projects related to Victorian poetry, and the General Editor of the collaborative, cross-institutional student wiki Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Contexts. Her publications include the monograph The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000) and a reference book (co-authored with Art Historian Joanna Meacock), The Rossetti Family Chronology (2007). She has edited the collection of essays Victorian Women Poets (2003), and co-edited Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (2003) and A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002). She has just completed the book-length study Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840-1870, and another monograph on Victorian poetry and European places is in preparation, supported by a SSHRC SRG award.
Monique R. Morgan
Monique R. Morgan is Associate Professor of English at McGill University, where she specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature, narrative theory, poetics, and science fiction. In 2010, she served as co-organizer of the NAVSA conference in Montréal. Her publications include Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem (Ohio State UP, 2009), part of which was published in Narrative; reviews of recent trends in the study of Victorian poetry for Literature Compass and Victorian Poetry; an article in Dickens Studies Annual on literacy, crime, and confession in Great Expectations; and an essay in BRANCH on scientific and literary responses to Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption. She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Estranged Cognition: Narrative and Epistemology in Victorian Science Fiction; parts of this project have been published in Romanticism on the Net and Science Fiction Studies.
ADVISORY BOARD: AMERICAN
Daniel Hack
Daniel Hack is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the English Department at the University of Michigan. His first book, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (2005), showed how novelists mobilized the physical and economic aspects of writing as sources of literary and cultural authority. His current book-project, tentatively titled “The African Americanization of Victorian Literature, Douglass to Du Bois,” recovers the role of Victorian literature in African American print culture and the African American literary tradition and explores the difference this history makes to our understanding of the Victorian canon. Work related to this project has appeared or is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Studies, Approaches to Teaching Dickens’s Bleak House, The Blackwell Companion to George Eliot, Early African American Print Culture, and The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. His essay “Close Reading at a Distance: The African Americanization of Bleak House” received Honorable Mention for NAVSA’s Donald Gray Prize. A member of NAVSA since its inception, he has attended the conference many times and has served as a judge for the graduate-student paper prize.
Teresa Mangum
Teresa Mangum is Associate Professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (U Michigan, 1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (Berg, forthcoming 2013); and guest editor of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. Her scholarship focuses on 19th-century novels and women, late life, and nonhuman animals, and on the teaching of Victorian literature, most recently in Victorians Institute Journal, Pedagogy, RaVoN, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Other Mothers (eds. Ellen Rosenman and Claudia Klaver), and Victorian Animal Dreams (eds. Deborah Morse and Martin Danahay). She co-edits the UI book series Humanities in Public Life and co-chairs the UI Steering Committee of the Public Humanities in a Digital World project. She has served as Associate Director of the Dickens Project, President of INCS, Chair of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee of the Modern Language Association, and, currently, as a member of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and the editorial boards of Victorian Review, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She has received the British Women Writers Association Biennial Award for Contributions to the Study of British Women Writers (2010), the UI President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence (2004), the UI Brody Award for Service to the University and State of Iowa (2008), and the U.S. Humane Society’s Animal and Society Course Award for Innovation (2005).
Daniel A. Novak
Daniel A. Novak is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is author of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2008) and co-editor with James Catano of Masculinity Lessons: Men, Masculinity, and Women's and Gender Studies (Johns Hopkins, 2011). Articles by Novak have appeared in Victorian Studies, Representations, Novel, Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and edited volumes from Ohio, Palgrave, and Ashgate. His current projects include Victoria’s Accursed Race, which analyzes nineteenth-century representations of the Cagots—an ethnic group of mysterious origins and indeterminate race—and Specters of Wilde, a book-length study of the origins of Wilde studies. He has been attending NAVSA regularly since 2006 and has greatly benefited from the intellectual community the organization has created and fostered.
ADVISORY BOARD: HISTORY
Joseph S. Meisel
Joseph S. Meisel, Deputy Provost at Brown University, is a historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain with primary research emphasis on politics and political culture. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Columbia University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Before coming to Brown, Meisel spent 11 years as a program officer for research universities and humanistic scholarship at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His publications include two monographs, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (Columbia UP, 2001) and Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), as well as numerous articles and book chapters, and he is co-author of Harry Furniss and “The Humours of Parliament”: A View of Late Victorian Political Culture (forthcoming from Ohio State UP). He has taught in British and World history at Columbia, Teacher’s College, and Baruch College of the City University of New York.
Peter H. Hoffenberg
Peter H. Hoffenberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where he teaches a variety of courses, including Tudor-Stuart Britain, Modern Britain, The British Empire, Modern World History, European History and Film, and The History of Economic Thought. His research interests include 19th-century international exhibitions, particularly in England, Australia and India; the history of Australian science; the history of post-1800 poverty and the poor; the Great War, and Victorian literature and essays. Dr. Hoffenberg’s publications include An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (University of California, 2001) and a series of book chapters and articles on topics such as Australian science, photography and architecture in 19th-century British India, William Morris, travel, and war & memory. He has also co-edited with William Galston, Poverty and Morality: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge, 2010) and with Jeffrey Auerbach, Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Ashgate, 2008) and is currently co-editing with Richard Fulton, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things are Possible (Ashgate, forthcoming). His current monograph project is tentatively titled From Gold to Federation: Exhibitions and the Rise of Modern Australia, 1851-1901, a study of Australian participation at overseas shows and of such exhibitions in the Australian colonies themselves. That should be submitted for review by a press in early 2013. Professionally, Hoffenberg has been active in the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies and the North American Conference on British Studies. At various times, he served as Treasurer of the former, and as a judge of graduate-student essays for both. He regularly attends and participates at the annual PCCBS meetings. Additionally, he is a Board Member and Editor for The Pacific Circle, an organization of scholars, scientists, government officials and others interested in the history and practice of science in the Pacific region. Hoffenberg edits the official publication, The Bulletin of the Pacific Circle, which includes professional information, current bibliographies and book reviews.
Amy Woodson-Boulton
Amy Woodson-Boulton is Associate Professor of History (Modern Britain and Ireland) at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Along with Erika Rappaport, Kate Flint, and Anne Helmreich, she is leading the program committee of the 2013 NAVSA conference, which will be in Pasadena, CA. She has published articles and reviews on museum history and nineteenth-century visual culture, as well as co-edited a volume for Ashgate called Visions of the Industrial Age: Representation and the Age of Anxiety in Europe, 1830-1914. Her monograph, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain, came out with Stanford University Press last year. She is currently working on a number of projects arising out of her interest in cultural responses to industrialization and the changing meaning and social role of nature, beauty, and art. These include studies of British and Irish reform movements aimed at consumption, of changing ideas about the meaning of natural beauty and morality in painting and poetry, and of anthropomorphism in modern Britain.
GRADUATE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE: WEST
Sarah Bull
Sarah Bull is a PhD candidate in English at Simon Fraser University. Her dissertation, “Obscenity and Sexology in British Print Culture, 1837-1914,” traces the history of the British pornography trade’s traffic in sexual science—from cheap medical handbooks to early sexological studies — through the Victorian period. She plans to defend in late Spring 2013. Her work draws from scholarship in literary studies, the history of the book, and the history of science. She has presented her work at several conferences, including at NAVSA 2011, and has an article in press at Victorian Review. During her MA program, she served as secretary of her department’s graduate caucus and co-organized a graduate conference hosted by her department. With the sizable portion of her dissertation now finished, she would relish the opportunity to extend her service to the profession outside Simon Fraser. She believes both NAVSA’s interdisciplinarity and ongoing efforts to foster international alliances among Victorianists are two of its greatest strengths that help graduate students flourish. She is able to attend the 2013 Pasadena conference and would like to bring the practical concerns related to an increasingly international job market into NAVSA graduate discussions at Pasadena, especially out of consideration for students who may be interested but unable to attend the 2013 Venice professionalization seminar. She believes such a discussion might also present an opportunity to talk about how grads could forge stronger ties with fellow students in sister organizations like BAVS and AVSA outside the space of the conference.
Kate Holterhoff
Kate Holterhoff is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies (LCS) at Carnegie Mellon University. She lives outside Boston and is adjuncting and completing her dissertation in absentia for 2014. As a Victorianist, she is passionate about our field, but as a graduate student she is concerned by the academy’s occupational uncertainties. If elected, she would forward the shared professional anxieties of NAVSA’s graduate students. Kate has a diverse academic professional background, ranging from designing upper-level Victorian literature classes at CMU to instructing a freshman humanities course at St. Anselm College. At CMU, she acted as committee member for the LCS colloquium speaker series. In her master’s program at the University of Cincinnati, she was elected English Graduate Organization president. These service experiences have exposed her to several university cultures and convinced her of the graduate-student community’s vitality. She hopes to explore ways, especially through interdisciplinarity, that NAVSA can make the unique skill sets of Victorianists valuable to hiring committees. Her ongoing interest in interdisciplinary research comes out of her bipartite art and literature training. In addition to interdisciplinarity’s centrality to her dissertation, her essay “Beauty As a Terministic Screen In Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man,” published in Victorian Network in 2010, is an example of how her own research engages the complexities and ironies of science and aesthetics.
Maha Jafri
Maha Jafri is a sixth-year PhD candidate in English at Northwestern University. Broadly, she works at the intersection of literature, psychology, and ethics. Her dissertation, “The Town’s Talk: Gossip, Sociability, and the Victorian Novel,” argues that gossip helped to crystallize the British novel’s distinctive role in nineteenth-century debates about social behavior by intervening in two sets of contemporaneous cultural discourses: etiquette and theories of sociability and community. Her project focuses on novels, Victorian etiquette books, and tabloids. She engages with nineteenth-century sociology, the century’s interest in psychology, and its most-popular communitarian philosophies. Maha’s work is highly interdisciplinary, and she has been successful at representing her project, herself, and her department both to other Victorianists and to specialists in other subfields and disciplines. She was recently awarded two major fellowships: the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (for projects that focus on ethics or religious values), and the Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship (which brings together an interdisciplinary society of junior and senior fellows from across the arts and sciences). Additionally, her article “Jamesian Sociability” appeared in the Henry James Review last fall. She has also been a fellow in Northwestern’s Paris Program in Critical Theory, as well as a recipient of the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award.
GRADUATE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE: EAST
Patrick Fessenbecker
Patrick Fessenbecker is in his sixth year in the PhD program in English at Johns Hopkins. The 2012 “Victorian Networks” conference, at which he presented on cosmopolitanism and communitarianism in Victorian ethical thought, was his second NAVSA conference. Patrick’s interest in graduate-student advocacy has long centered on graduate-student labor issues: he has served as the Financial Concerns Chair in the Hopkins graduate-student organization for the last two years, and directed the analysis of a quality-of-life survey of Hopkins graduate students used to argue for increased compensation. He attended the Legislative Action days put on by the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students in Washington D.C. in fall 2012 to help with efforts to resolve the graduate-student case currently before the National Labor Relations Board. As graduate students face increasingly desperate job market conditions, he thinks strong graduate-student labor organizations offer essential support for students who are unable to find work immediately. Patrick’s dissertation is titled "Novels and Ideas: Conceptions of Agency in Nineteenth-Century Fiction." He examines a series of authors from England and America against a background of ideas in moral philosophy. His essay "In Defense of Paraphrase," taken from the introduction, won the 2012 Ralph Cohen prize, and is forthcoming in New Literary History. He has also published essays on Henry James and Jane Austen in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Studies in English Literature, respectively.
John MacNeill Miller
John MacNeill Miller is a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers. His dissertation, entitled "Experimental Subjects: Animals, Ethics, and the Novel," looks at the formal strategies for depicting animals in the Victorian realist novel. It examines the impact those strategies have on the social and ethical legacies of literary realism—especially in relation to other discursive attempts to represent man's place in the world in the nineteenth century, including political economy, natural history, and evolutionary biology. As part of that project, he presented a paper at NAVSA 2012 entitled "Humanizing the Social Network in George Eliot and G. H. Lewes" (winner of the NAVSA prize for best graduate-student paper at the annual conference). He also presented a paper at NAVSA 2011 on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and abolitionist poetry. He is planning to attend the 2013 Pasadena conference, regardless of whether or not he presents. He has some past administrative/academic service experience that might prove relevant to this position, including serving as one of two graduate-student representatives on the Graduate Executive Committee of the Rutgers English department in the year that the department re-shaped its qualifying exams, and also serving as one of two graduate-student coordinators/"Cruise Directors" of the Dickens Universe at UC-Santa Cruz, summer 2012.
Jessica Valdez
Jessica Valdez is a PhD candidate in English at Johns Hopkins University. She is committed to representing graduate-student interests in light of the changing conditions of the job market, and is eager to serve as NAVSA’s graduate representative. Her dissertation, “Mediating Englishness: Newspapers and National Identity in the Victorian Novel," argues that Victorian novels commonly depict newspaper reading in order to understand and critique the kind of national feeling elicited by the popular press. Related to this project, she presented a paper at NAVSA 2012 called, “Trial by Newspaper and the Victorian Novel”; she also moderated the panel “Criminal Networks in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” At NAVSA 2011, she presented a paper about Wilkie Collins in the seminar, “Sociology, the Novel, and Everyday Life.” Although Jessica is a literary critic, her research is interdisciplinary and deals with cultural history, periodical studies, and Jewish studies. Her organizational and representative experience includes the following positions: managing editor for ELH (2009-12); representative on external review boards for Johns Hopkins’ English Department; department representative for and chair of the Johns Hopkins Philological Society (2009-11). Her article, “Dickens’s ‘Pious Fraud’: The Popular Press and Narrative’s Potential for Social Control,” came out in Victorian Periodicals Review in December 2011, and she has a forthcoming review in Victorian Studies. She plans to attend the fall 2013 conference whether or not she presents.
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL: EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
Deborah Denenholz Morse
Deborah Denenholz Morse is Professor of English at The College of William and Mary and author of Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels and Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (forthcoming from Ashgate in March of 2013). She is the co-editor of the collections The Erotics of Instruction (with Regina Barreca, 1997), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (with Martin Danahay 2007), and The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels (with Margaret Markwick and Regenia Gagnier 2009). Professor Morse is the co-author (with Margaret Markwick) of Trollope Underground (forthcoming from Ashgate in the fall of 2014) and co-editor (with Margaret Markwick and Mark Turner) of The Ashgate Research Companion to Anthony Trollope (forthcoming in 2015). She was a keynote speaker at the 2006 Trollope and Gender Conference at the University of Exeter and the Inaugural Trollope Prize lecturer this April at the University of Kansas. Deborah is a plenary lecturer and panel organizer for the 2015 Bicentennial Trollope Conference in Leuven, Belgium. Deborah Morse has published around thirty essays on the Brontës, Gaskell, Trollope, Maxine Hong Kingston, A. S. Byatt, Mona Simpson, Kay Boyle, Elizabeth Coles Taylor, Hesba Stretton, Catherine Cookson, and within Animal Studies. Her current monograph (in progress) is The Loss of the English Greenwood: the Brontës to Mary Webb. Deborah Morse is a current Plumeri Outstanding Scholar-Teacher at William and Mary. She has been the recipient of five teaching awards, most recently the 2008 Phi Beta Kappa and Thomas A. Graves Awards for Sustained Excellence in Teaching and the 2009-2011 Inaugural Devin and Jennifer Murphy Fellowship for Outstanding Integration of Research and Teaching. In 2011, Deborah Morse was the College’s humanities nominee for the nation-wide Baylor Cherry Great Teachers Award. She served as Essay Submissions Editor for the Victorians Institute Journal from 2005-2009 and has been a Board Member, Vice-President, and President of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies.
Elsie Michie
Elsie Michie is Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Her books include Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Cornell 1993) and The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Johns Hopkins 2011). She has edited Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Casebook (Oxford 2006), co-edited Victorian Vulgarity: Taste In Verbal and Visual Culture (Ashgate 2009), and edited The Lottery of Marriage for The Widow and Wedlock Novels of Frances Trollope (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Her most recent articles are “Kidnapped Romance: From Walter Scott to C. S. Lewis” (Neo-Victorian Studies), “History after Waterloo: Margaret Oliphant Reads Walter Scott” (ELH, forthcoming), “Morbidity in the Fairyland of Fiction: Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and the Rhetoric of Abolition” (Partial Answers), and “Frances Trollope’s One Fault and the Evolution of the Novel” (Women’s Writing). She is currently preparing an Oxford World Classics edition of Domestic Manners of the Americans and writing a new book Trollopizing the Canon about Frances Trollope’s social problem novels and the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. She was board member then vice president and president of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies) and is now a member of the Executive Committee for the MLA Division on Anthropological Approaches to Literature as well as of the Executive Committee for the Dickens Project. She co-organized the 2012 and 2013 Dickens Universe Conferences and will be holding the 2013 Winter Conference at LSU.