Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism, University of Hull, 26 March 2011
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Nadine Christina Boehm holds a PhD from the Friedrich-Alexander-University at ErlangenNuremberg, where she works as a lecturer in English literature and cultural studies. She is
interested in intersections of different fields of knowledge, and has published on a variety of
subjects, among them the role of religious and ethical discourses in contemporary popular
film and literature, cultural hermeneutics, and post-colonial translation. Her current work
deals with neo-Victorian and Victorian Studies. Her recent book project deals with the
cultural history of perception in nineteenth-century texts and the re-evaluation of aesthetics in
terms of aisthesis within Cultural Studies.
Dr Dietmar Böhnke is Lecturer in British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig,
Germany. His research interests include Scottish literature, culture, history and politics,
especially of the twentieth century; the Victorian age and its contemporary rewritings; and
the British media, especially film. He has published various articles on these topics, as well as
two books on contemporary Scottish authors: Kelman Writes Back: Literary Politics in the
Work of a Contemporary Scottish Writer (Berlin 1999), and Shades of Gray: Science Fiction,
History and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Work of Alasdair Gray (Berlin 2004). Most
recently, he has co-edited a collection of essays on Victorian and neo-Victorian topics,
Victorian Highways, Victorian Byways (Berlin 2010). He is a member of the editorial board
of Neo-Victorian Studies. In 2005, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Kym Brindle has recently obtained her PhD from Lancaster University for a research topic
entitled ‘Epistolary Encounters: Diary and Letter Pastiche in Neo-Victorian Fiction’. Her
study was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and she was examined by
Professor Ann Heilmann. She is an Associate Tutor at Edge Hill University and Lancaster
University and teaches on a variety of courses. An article entitled ‘Diary as Queer Malady:
Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’s Affinity’ was published in the Winter 2009/2010
edition of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies and she has essays in the forthcoming Palgrave
edited collection Histories and Heroines and also the third volume of neo-Victorian studies,
Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth
Century, due to be published by Rodopi in 2012. She is presently preparing her thesis for a
book proposal
Dr Jessica Cox is a Lecturer in English at Brunel University. She has research interests in
Victorian and neo-Victorian sensation fiction, and is currently working on a book exploring
the links between the two. She is the co-founder of the Brunel Interdisciplinary Network on
Gender and Sexuality, and is currently co-organising the FWSA bi-annual conference, on
‘The Futures of Feminism’, to be held at Brunel University in July 2011.
Dr Helen Davies is an associate Lecturer in English Literature at Leeds Metropolitan
University. Her recent publications include an article on ventriloquism and mediumship in
Sarah Waters’ Affinity for Autopsia journal and a chapter for an edited collection of essays on
Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Her book, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian
Fiction, is being published by Palgrave Macmillan. Helen is the Secretary of the
Contemporary Women’s Writing Association and the consultant on neo-Victorianism for The
Oscholars journal.
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Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism, University of Hull, 26 March 2011
Dr Sarah Edwards is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her
publications include articles in Women’s Writing, Journal of Gender Studies, Life Writing,
Journal of Popular Culture and the Review of English Studies. She is completing her first
monograph, The Edwardians Since 1910 and is the leader of an ESRC seminar series,
Nostalgia in the 21st Century (2010-11), She is also co-editing a collection of essays on
literature and architecture, Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, for
Routledge.
Dr Susanne Gruss is a lecturer in English literature and culture at Erlangen University. She
has published a monograph on contemporary feminist writing (The Pleasure of the Feminist
Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter), and written articles on film adaptation,
questions of canonisation, ecofeminism, and the Gothic conventions in Harry Potter. Her
research interests include gender studies, film and media studies, contemporary literature,
neo-Victorianism, the intersection of legal discourses and literature, and Jacobean revenge
tragedy.
Theresa Jamieson is a final year PhD student at the University of Hull. She specializes in
Victorian and Neo-Victorian studies, and is particularly interested in revisionary fiction and
neo-Victorianism in an international context. Other research interests lie in the fields of
contemporary women’s writing, historical fiction, and the life and works of the nineteenth
century novelist and playwright Richard Pryce.
Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke lectures in English Literature at Swansea University, Wales, and is
the General Editor of the peer-reviewed Neo-Victorian Studies e-journal, which she founded
in 2008. Her research specialisms and publications focus on neo-Victorianism, trauma theory,
and gender, with particular emphasis on themes of sexuality, violence, the historical
imagination and cultural memory. Her articles on women’s historical fiction and trauma
narratives have appeared in Feminist Review and Women: A Cultural Review, and she coedited Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (with Luisa Orza, Rodopi,
2008). She is co-editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s 6-volume Neo-Victorian
Series, of which the first collection of critical essays, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The
Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, was published in 2010.
Bethany Layne is a second-year PhD student at the University of Leeds, where she is writing
a thesis on ‘(Post)Modernist Biofictions: Literary Afterlives of Henry James, Virginia Woolf,
and Sylvia Plath’. Last year she co-organised an international conference, ‘Re-Imagining the
Victorians: 1901-2010’. Her work has appeared in Women and the Arts and Textual Practice,
and she is a contributor for the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.
Nadine Muller is a final-year Ph.D. student at the the University of Hull, where her
research is funded by an institutional 80th Anniversary Doctoral Scholarship in NeoVictorianism. Her thesis examines representations of gender and sexuality in twenty-first
century neo-Victorian fiction and their relationship to third-wave feminism. Nadine’s
research interests fall into four intersecting areas: contemporary feminist theory and practice
(particularly in the areas of sex work and mental health); gender and sexuality in Victorian
literature and culture; neo-Victorianism; and contemporary women's fiction. She is an
executive committee member of the Feminist & Women’s Studies Association UK & Ireland
(FWSA), a steering group member of the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing
Network (PG CWWN) and the founder of the AHRC-funded initiative PEGS (Public
Engagement in Gender & Sexuality). Besides completing her doctoral thesis, Nadine is
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Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism, University of Hull, 26 March 2011
currently in the process of preparing her post-doctoral project, The Widow in British
Literature and Culture, 1860 - 2010.
Allison Neal is in the second year of her doctoral research here at Hull. Her
thesis is entitled ‘(Neo-)Victorian Impersonations: Nineteenth-Century Transvestism in
Contemporary Literature and Culture’. She defines her approach as interdisciplinary in nature
and draws on critical literary analysis, historical evidence and contemporary gender theory, in
order to examine protagonists and characters in neo-Victorian literature who cross-dress. Her
thesis chapters include explorations into the historical personas of James Barry MD, Hannah
Cullwick and Vesta Tilley, and literary texts such as: Tipping the Velvet (Sarah Waters),
Misfortune (Wesley Stace) and Mademoiselle de Maupin (Théophile Gautier). Allison is also
a seminar tutor for an undergraduate module on Modernist Literature within the English
department.
Amber Pouliot is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, where she writes about the
significance of Brontë fictional biography circa 1910-1940. She has recently co-organised an
international conference on Neo-Victorianism at the University of Leeds, ‘Re-imagining the
Victorians: 1901-2010’. She is a reviewer for the Victorian Network, and also jointly runs the
Leeds Nineteenth-Century Reading Group.
Christine Wilks is a British writer and artist who creates Electronic Literature, e-poetry and
digital artworks for the web at www.crissxross.net and engages in collaborative remixing at
www.remixworx.net. Her playable media fiction Underbelly won the New Media Writing
Prize 2010. Her work is published in online journals and anthologies, including the
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, issue 08,
Studies in the Maternal, The Line of Influence and De Geuzen’s Female Icons. She has
presented her works of e-literature at festivals and conferences, including Language in Digital
Performance at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2010, Ilkley
Literature Fringe Festival, The Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2010,
Performance Writing 2010, Transliteracy Conference 2010, e-Poetry 2009, Writing
Bodies/Reading Bodies in Contemporary Women's Writing 2009, Electronic Literature in
Europe 2008, Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts 2008 and Interactive Futures
2007. Before becoming engrossed in the web, she made short films, videos, installations and
wrote screenplays. She is Creative Director of Make It Happen, e-learning specialists for
voluntary and non-profit organisations.
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