Nineteenth-Century British Studies Students

Perhaps the best view of the nineteenth-century British area comes from our students. They note that the camaraderie among those working in the area, the interdisciplinary focus of coursework, and an especially generous faculty promote student growth and advancement.

One student comments that the area welcomes “students interested in crossing traditional boundaries” and, for example, “approaches that integrate Irish Studies and postcolonial perspectives with Victorian Studies.” Another comments that it is “rare to find faculty members who are willing to read and re-read a [student's writing] as many times as the faculty at Notre Dame have for me and to spend so much time and energy really thinking about my project and where it fits in the field.”

The high degree of cooperation among students and faculty is manifest in the Nineteenth-Century British Seminar, which serves as a venue for debating current topics in nineteenth-century studies and presenting work in progress. Interdisciplinary work is enhanced by the fact that our department sponsors the journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Student Accomplishments

Our graduate students have recently placed articles in ELH, European Romantic Review, Victorians Institute Journal, The Minnesota Review, and Victorian Poetry; they have given papers at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, North American Victorian Studies Association American, the Conference for Irish Studies, and other leading conferences. Undergraduate students have gone on to graduate studies at premier programs such as Cornell, Northwestern, Virginia, and Indiana.

Current Doctoral Students

Brooke Cameron's dissertation, "Female-female Bonds and the Political Economy of Sex: Economic Theory and Sexual Reform at the Fin-de-siècle," considers the intersections between sexual reform and economic theory at the turn of the century.

Heather Edwards is working on a dissertation entitled "Alternative Geographies: Uncovering the New Woman in Irish Literature," which attempts to remap discussions about the New Woman to include Irish negotiations of the figure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Benjamin Fischer is working on a dissertation titled "Logics of Supremacy: Missionary 'Provocations' and British Imperial Influence in China, 1795-1845," which explores the role of Evangelical publications from China in the first third of the nineteenth-century and how their multiple and conflicting logics allowed them to be used as tools for both justifying and criticising the Opium War.

Juan Sanchez's dissertation, "Spain and the Liberal Romantic Imagination: Conceptualizing the Modern Liberal State in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain," considers the role of Spain in the development of British romantic literature, particularly in relation to that literature's engagement with the political controversies surrounding the conceptualization of the modern liberal state in Britain during the early nineteenth century.

Angela Thum is exploring how the gothic disrupts imperial progress and knowledge gathering in nineteenth-century British novels about Empire in her dissertation, "Documenting Empire: Knowledge Production and Control in Nineteenth-Century Gothic Imperial Literature." Her article "Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea: A Rereading of Colonialism," appeared in Michigan Academician.

Teresa Huffman Traver is currently completing a dissertation entitled, "'I have not a home': Catholic Conversion and English Identity," which argues that narratives of Catholic conversion provided a rhetorical tool through which mid-century Britons could re-imagine domestic, religions, and national communities.

Recent Doctoral Students

Nathan Elliott (Ph.D., 2006) recently completed his dissertation entitled, "Evolving Science Fictions: Biological Representation in Nineteenth-Century Britain," and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Notre Dame. His interdisciplinary dissertation argues that biological representation in both the science and the literature of nineteenth-century Britain created a distinct epistemological anxiety that still impacts our culture today. His article, "'Unball'd Sockets' and the 'Mockery of Speech': Diagnostic Anxiety and the Theater of Joanna Baillie," is forthcoming in European Romantic Review.

Lara Karpenko (Ph.D., 2006) is Assistant Professor at Carroll College. Her dissertation, "Extraordinary Sensations: Imagining the Body in Victorian Popular Culture," examines Victorian best-selling novels and widespread cultural manias in order to suggest that Victorian popular culture paradoxically standardized non-standard bodily experiences. Her article, "Purchasing Largely: Trilby and the Fin de Siècle Reader," is forthcoming in the Victorians Institute Journal.

Kristin Mahoney (Ph.D., 2004) Post-doctoral Fellow at Case Western Reserve, has also been a post-doctoral fellow at Notre Dame and Duke. Her article, “Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption,” is forthcoming in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Her dissertation, “Appreciation and Innovation: History and Economics in Late-Victorian Aestheticism,” argues that members of the Aesthetic Movement, rather than retreating from the politics of modernity, as the credo “art for art’s sake” might imply, actively engage with the emergence of modern consumerism in their works of historical literature.

Rachel Malane (Ph.D., 2004) is a Manuscript Editor at the University of Chicago Press. Peter Lang Press published her dissertation, Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences in 2005. This study explores the role of the gendered brain in Victorian literature and science, showing the increasing nineteenth-century fixation on abnormal brain function and how the narratives of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy were in dynamic conversation with the prevailing ideas about the mind. 

Michael Tomko (Ph.D., 2005) Assistant Professor of Humanities at Villanova University, has published the articles, “ Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology” in Victorian Poetry and “Abolition Poetry, National Identity, and Religion: The Case of Peter Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona,” in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. His dissertation, “The Catholic Question in British Romantic Literature: National Identity, History, and Religious Politics, 1778-1829,” examines the intersection of religious discourse, national historiography, and political reform within the struggle for Catholic Emancipation, one of the most contentious but critically neglected issues in romantic period literature.