Notes on Contributors

Juliette Atkinson is Professor of English at University College London. She is the author of Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (OUP, 2010), French Novels and the Victorians (OUP, 2017), and George Eliot: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2025). She has published editions of The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Jane Eyre for Oxford World’s Classics and is the Victorian–Present editor for the OUP journal Review of English Studies.

Ayelet Ben-Yishai teaches postcolonial and Victorian literature at the English Department at the University of Haifa, where she specialises in the history and theory of the novel, with particular focus on questions of realism, genre, and literary epistemology. She has written extensively on the intersection of law, politics, history, and literature, especially in Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Fiction and Law (OUP, 2013) and Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (OUP, 2023). She is currently working on a new project on complicity, realism, and comparative method.

Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on Victorian literature, with a special interest in John Ruskin. Her books include Ruskin’s Myths (OUP, 1988), Our Victorian Education (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and Anthony Trollope (OUP, 2025); she is also the General Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (OUP, 2009). She has published editions of the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot, together with articles and essays on their work. She writes for the TLS and the LRB, contributes to television and radio broadcasts on the arts, and has served on the Booker Prize panel.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer is Professor Emerita at Boston College. She is the author of The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1994) and a number of other essays on George Eliot. Her work explores the relationships between letters, biography, and imaginative fiction—a method continued in her Samuel Beckett in the OUP series My Reading (2022). Experimenting with a book written in dialogue form between two authors, she and Philip Davis have published In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart (OUP, 2024).

Alison Booth is Brown-Forman Professor of English and Faculty Director, Digital Humanities Center, University of Virginia. She directs a digital textual study, Collective Biographies of Women. Her books include Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell University Press, 1992); How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (OUP, 2016). She co-edited ‘Varieties of Digital Humanities’, PMLA, 135.1 (2020) with Miriam Posner. Her article, ‘But Why Always the Novel?’ appeared in the special issue, ‘Culture, Theory, Data’, of New Literary History, 53.4, 54.1 (2023).

Isabella Brooks-Ward has held positions at the University of Oxford and Birkbeck University and currently holds the Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship affiliated with the University of Glasgow. She is completing a monograph on self-help in the works of George Eliot and George Meredith.

Clare Carlisle is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. She is the author of seven books, including The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (Penguin/FSG, 2023), and is the editor of Spinoza’s Ethics, Translated by George Eliot (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud teaches at the University of Tennessee, where he also serves as director of undergraduate studies in English. He is the author of Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism (CUP, 2015) and of essays in ELH, MLQ, GLQ, differences, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among other journals.

Elisha Cohn is Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is author of Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (OUP, 2016), which won Honourable Mention in the Sonia Rudikoff First Book Prize in Victorian Studies, and Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel (Stanford University Press, 2025). She has published in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere.

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS). His publications include: The Victorians 1830–1880 in the Oxford English Literary History series; Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); The Transferred Life of George Eliot (OUP, 2017); Reading for Life (OUP, 2020); My William James (OUP, 2022); and In Dialogue with Dickens (OUP, 2024), co-written with Rosemarie Bodenheimer. He is a general editor of two Oxford University Press series, The Literary Agenda and My Reading.

Fionnuala Dillane is Professor of Nineteenth-Century literature and culture in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin. She is the author of Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (CUP, 2013) and co-editor of six collections of essays including Iceland–Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery (Brill, 2022) with Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir and a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review (Summer 2022) on the book review, with Laurel Brake and Mark W. Turner. She is co-editing, with Marianne van Remoortel, The Brill Handbook of Transnational Periodical Research, an open access publication forthcoming in 2026.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include Victorian Afterlives (OUP, 2002), Becoming Dickens (Harvard University Press, 2011), The Story of Alice (Harvard University Press, 2015), The Turning Point (Vintage, 2021) and Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces (Vintage, 2023). He writes regularly for publications including the Times, Spectator, and Literary Review and has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations, and Dickensian. He has judged the Man Booker Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize, and in 2015 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Shannon Draucker is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Siena College in Loudonville, NY. Her first book, Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature, appeared with SUNY Press in 2024. Her work has also appeared in venues such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. She is also a classically-trained clarinettist.

Jonathan Farina is Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Seton Hall University, where he teaches nineteenth-century British literature and culture, the novel, and critical theory. Farina is the author of Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (CUP, 2017), which received Honourable Mention for the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian Studies, and numerous articles and chapters on the history of literary criticism, prose style, character, colloquialisms, and nineteenth-century fiction. He served as President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association from 2018 to 2022.

Devin Griffiths is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His research sits at the intersection of environmental history, philosophy of science, and literary studies. Central to that work is the question of how literary form shapes our experience of relation and natural systems. His first book, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), was a runner up for book prizes by the British Society of Literature and Science and the British Association for Romantic Studies. With Deanna Kreisel, he is also co-editor of After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (CUP, 2022). His work has appeared in various journals, including Critical Inquiry, Book History, ELH, SEL, and Victorian Studies. He is currently studying the intertwined histories of environmental aesthetics, the history of ecology, and energy extraction.

Nancy Henry is the Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of George Eliot and the British Empire (CUP, 2002), the Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (CUP, 2008), The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment (Palgrave, 2018). She is co-editor (with George Levine) of the Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2nd edition, CUP, 2019). She is a co-editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture and George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies.

Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature Emerita, TCU, specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, gender and women’s studies, and transnationality. Her monograph Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (CUP, 2022) devotes two chapters to Eliot. Her 2023 essay in volume 75 of the George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies examines Eliot’s legacies for the New Woman novelist and poet Amy Levy. She is additionally co-editor, with Sarah R. Robbins and Andrew Taylor, of Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), which includes Eliot’s 1856 review of Stowe’s Dred.

Isobel Hurst is Lecturer in English and Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research examines the reception of Greek and Latin literature in English, looking at the connection between classical education and authorship and women writers’ creative engagement with the classical tradition. She is the author of Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (OUP, 2006) and has published essays in the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (OUP, 2013) and the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OUP, 2019).

Howard Jacobson has written seventeen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J. He is an Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor at the New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University London.

Audrey Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of numerous essays on Victorian fiction. Her books include Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Cornell University Press, 2000), The Affective Life of the Average Man (Ohio State University Press, 2010), and The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (OUP, 2016). With Elaine Hadley and Sarah Winter, she is co-editor of From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Matthew Kaiser is Professor of English at University of California, Merced. He is the author of The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford University Press, 2012) and the editor of eleven books, most recently of A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020) and (with Will Visconti) the forthcoming four-volume Comedy, Humour and Laughter: A Documentary History, 1800–1920 (Routledge, 2025).

Sebastian Lecourt is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. His research focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularisation, colonialism, and comparativism. He is the author of Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (OUP, 2018) and his essays have appeared in PMLA, Representations, Victorian Studies, ELH, and Victorian Literature and Culture. He is currently working on a book entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783–1927.

Sungmey Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Korea National Open University in South Korea. Her research interests include nineteenth-century national and imperial landscapes, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the reception of Victorian literature in East Asia. Her work has been published in Feminist Studies in English Literature, The Explicator, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English.

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University and author of four books, including The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Her most recent book is The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023). She is the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

Ruth Livesey is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism (OUP, 2007) and Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (OUP, 2016). Since 2019 she has been Principal Investigator of a series of UK Arts and Humanities Research Council projects exploring the idea of provincialism, provincial fiction, and Englishness with a focus on the afterlives of George Eliot and present-day communities in the West Midlands.

Olivia Loksing Moy is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Lehman College, where she specialises in nineteenth-century British poetry. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), co-editor of Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), and, with Marco Ramírez Rojas, translator and editor of Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats (Lost and Found, 2019).

Stefanie Markovits is Professor of English at Yale University and the author of The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2006), The Crimean War in the British Imagination (CUP, 2009), and The Victorian Verse Novel: Aspiring to Life (OUP, 2017). Her new book, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (OUP, 2025), considers what happens when we encounter all kinds of numbers—be they expressed as words or figures—in the novels and poems of this very numbery period.

Gail Marshall is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture, and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading. Her books include Shakespeare and Victorian Women (CUP, 2009), Victorian Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2002), and Actresses on the Victorian Stage (CUP, 1998). She is the editor of books on Shakespeare and the Victorians, George Eliot, and the fin de siècle and is currently completing a project on the literature and culture of 1859 before beginning research on the archives of the Royal Society of Literature.

Gage McWeeny is Professor of English at Williams College. He is the author of The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form (OUP, 2016).

Elsie Michie is Professor Emerita in the English Department at Louisiana State University. She has published two monographs: Outside the Pale (Cornell University Press, 1993) and The Vulgar Question of Money (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). She has edited or co-edited several collections of essays. Her articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, ELQ, Victorian Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She is completing a book, provisionally titled Trollopizing the Canon, about Frances Trollope’s influence on Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.

Alison Milbank is Canon Theologian at Southwell Minster and a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Macmillan, 1992), Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 1998), Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (T & T Clark, 2007), God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (OUP, 2018), and editions of Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and A Sicilian Romance, both for Oxford World’s Classics.

Anna Neill is Professor of English and Interim Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of three books: British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce (Palgrave, 2002); Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2013), and Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction (Routledge, 2021). She is currently at work on a novel about the lives of William and May Morris.

Deborah Epstein Nord is Woodrow Wilson Professor Emerita at Princeton University. She is the author of The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Cornell University Press, 1995), Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (Columbia University Press, 2006), and, with Maria DiBattista, At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2017), and the editor of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (Yale University Press, 2002). Her current work centres on the relationship between nineteenth-century fiction and the visual arts.

Yi-Ping Ong is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her book The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines authority, freedom, and self-knowledge in the history and theory of the novel and in existentialism. Other work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature has appeared in PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Comparative Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Post45, nonsite, and The Harvard Review. Her current project explores the power of literary form to illuminate structures of oppression, inauthenticity, and dehumanisation.

Anthony Ossa-Richardson is Associate Professor in English at UCL. He has written two monographs, the more recent of which is A History of Ambiguity (Princeton University Press, 2019), an account of the way readers posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the presence of multiple meanings in texts from antiquity to the twentieth century. He has also co-translated Johannes Leo Africanus’s Cosmography and Geography of Africa (Penguin, 2023), the first book about Africa to be printed in Europe, and written many essays on various aspects of literary and intellectual history, including recent pieces on Proust, French colonial geographical scholarship, and the Victorian notion of unconscious hypocrisy.

Thomas Owens read English at St Andrews and Oxford; he has held academic positions at Cambridge, UCL and Stanford; he now works in a quarry on the Jurassic Coast. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and ‘the language of the heavens’ appeared with Oxford University Press in 2019.

John Plotz is Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University and editor of the B-Sides feature in Public Books. He co-hosts the podcast Recall This Book. His books include The Crowd (University of California Press, 2000), Portable Property (Princeton University Press, 2008), Semi-Detached (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea: My Reading (OUP, 2023). He is currently at work on a study of satirical science fiction, ‘Laughter is from Mars.’

Kent Puckett holds the Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley and is author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (OUP, 2008), Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (CUP, 2016), War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 (Fordham University Press, 2017), and The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems (CUP, 2022).

Supritha Rajan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her scholarly articles have been published in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture. Her book, A Tale of Two Capitalisms: Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Michigan Press, 2015), was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book. Her current book project, tentatively titled Transparent Forms: Thinking, Feeling, and Doing in the Human and Natural Sciences, 1780–1890, examines the relationship between discipline-formation and the cultivation of specific cognitive and affective attitudes during the long nineteenth century.

Cristina Richieri Griffin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, the history of the novel, gender and sexuality studies, and literature pedagogy. Her articles have appeared in ELH, Modern Philology, Victorian Studies, and elsewhere. She is the director of Project Gothic, the digital archive for the Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction, and of Teaching Literature for Liberation, a publicly engaged digital project and community partnership to encourage more diverse and equitable K-12 literature curricula.

John Rignall is Reader Emeritus in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His publications include Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (Routledge, 1992), George Eliot, European Novelist (Ashgate, 2011), and, as editor, George Eliot and Europe (Routledge, 1997), the Everyman Paperback edition of Daniel Deronda (J. M. Dent, 1999), and The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (OUP, 2000). He is co-editor of the George Eliot Review.

Charlotte Roberts is Associate Professor of English at University College London. She is the author of Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History (OUP, 2014) and has published widely on eighteenth-century prose including, most recently, on Samuel Richardson.

Aaron Rosenberg is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at King’s College London. His book, Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel: Extreme Measures was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. His work has appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire.

Jesse Rosenthal is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Summer J. Star is Associate Professor of English Literature at San Francisco State University. She specialises in mid-Victorian literature, having published articles and book chapters on the works of Alfred Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.

Matthew Sussman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he specialises in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. He is the author of Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics, and the Novel (CUP, 2021), and co-editor, with Margaret Harris, of Antipodean George Eliot (Routledge, 2023). Other essays on Victorian authors and essayists have appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Studies in English Literature.

Kathryn Sutherland is a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Recent publications include a critical edition, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts (5 vols, OUP, 2018), and Why Modern Manuscripts Matter (OUP, 2022), a study of the politics, commerce, and aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors’ draft manuscripts. She is an editor of and contributor to The Blavatnik Honresfield Library: Saved for the Nation (Friends of the National Libraries, 2023), which tells the story of the campaign to save from dispersal a major private library. Forthcoming work includes Jane Austen in 41 Objects (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2025).

David Sweeney Coombs is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Clemson University. He is the author of Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science (University of Virginia Press, 2019), which traces the history of perceptual theories of reading in nineteenth-century science, aesthetics, and literature. He is currently working on a conceptual history of crisis as it evolves in the nineteenth-century historical novel after Walter Scott.

Daniel Tyler is the Principal of St Andrew’s College, within the University of Sydney. He was previously the Vice-Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He has edited several essay collections including Dickens’s Style (CUP, 2013), Poetry in the Making: Composition and Revision in Victorian Poetic Drafts (OUP, 2020), and On Style in Victorian Fiction (CUP, 2022).

Jessica R. Valdez is an Assistant Professor of nineteenth-century English literature at Louisiana State University, and previously worked at Hong Kong University and the University of East Anglia, UK. Her research focuses on novelistic form, media, and empire in nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is currently working on a new monograph tentatively called Despots and Democrats: China and America in British Literature, 1832–1901 that examines intersecting imaginaries of the United States and China in British culture. Her first book, Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), argued that Victorian novelists were early media theorists. She has published work in journals including Victorian Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Global Nineteenth-Century Studies.

Carolyn Williams teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, where she is Distinguished Professor and Kenneth Burke Chair in English. In addition to articles and book chapters on Victorian novels, poetry, essays, and theatre, she is the author of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (Columbia University Press, 2011) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (CUP, 2018). Earlier books are Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Cornell University Press, 1989) and the co-edited collection of essays (with Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (ELT Press, 2002). Lately, she has been working on a study of melodrama in Victorian fiction, under the title Melodramatic Form.

Nancy Yousef is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. Her work addresses intersections between philosophical writing and literary form, and the relations between aesthetics, ethics, and representation of the emotions. She is the author of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 2004), Romantic Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 2013; winner of the Barricelli Prize), and The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day (OUP, 2022), as well as essays on Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Dickens, and Mill.