reflective of the joy I derive from doing scholarship

I enjoy making my scholarship accessible to the non-academic public. Here’s a newspaper story about my early work on Victorian matrimonials and the presentation I did for the local chapter of the Victorian Society of America. I almost always have multiple writing projects going at the same time; here’s what’s on currently:

An essay I recently completed examines Edith J. Simcox’s story collection, Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers. Supplementing the autobiographical criticism of this text (which tends to focus on how it is about Simcox’s passion for George Eliot), I argue that Episodes exemplifies an early mode of queer formalism. This essay is forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture.

I continue to work on a project that started as a conference paper entitled “Matrimonial ‘Murder’ in Translation: Dickens-Corelli-Hossain” for the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s 2021 virtual conference. That presentation discussed Corelli’s adaptation of a Dickens rumor in her novel Murder of Delicia. I then discussed Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s abridged translation and commentary on Corelli’s novel, Delicia Hatya in a virtual panel at MLA 2022 (Britain, Empire, and Global Afterlives: 1850–1950). I’m currently preparing a presentation for the British Women Writers Conference at Baylor University in May on Hossain’s novel Padmarag.

A project that’s been back-burnered for a while (for various reasons including pregnancy, childbirth, nursing an infant, getting distracted by new projects), focuses on representations of infanticide in Victorian fiction and news stories. I’m not sure when I’ll return to this. How do you know when you’re too long away from something?

Lastly, a long-term exploration of a nineteenth-century illustrated humor newspaper published in the 1890s in Norfolk, VA. I’ve drafted a chapter on vagrancy laws and jokes about tramps, tentatively titled “Idle Laughter,” as well as the beginning of an introduction that provides some history of the newspaper. During my sabbatical in spring 2020 I drafted several other sections of early chapters.