About | History | Executive
Founders’ Circle Award
Current Executive Council
President
Dr. Heather Marcovitch (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Red Deer Polytechnic)
Heather Marcovitch is an instructor at Red Deer Polytechnic. Her research focuses on the fin de siècle, with a particular focus on The Yellow Book, New Woman writing, and Oscar Wilde. She is the author of The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory and the forthcoming A Companion to Oscar Wilde’s Writings, as well as essays on Wilde, his afterlives, and New Woman writers Ella D’Arcy and George Egerton.
Secretary/Treasurer
Dr. Heather McAlpine (Department of English, University of the Fraser Valley)
Heather McAlpine is an Associate Professor in the English department at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC. She is the author of Emblematic Strategies in Victorian Literature (Brill, 2019) and has published articles on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, especially The Germ and the poetry of Dante and Christina Rossetti, as well as on digital pedagogy. Her recent research examines the colonial underpinnings of the emblem tradition and its influence on the work of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound.
Victorian Review Managing Editor
Dr. Janice Schroeder (Department of English, Carleton University)
Janice Schroeder is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Carleton University. She is the co-editor of Ordinary Oralities: Everyday Voices in History with Josephine Hoegaerts and the co-editor of a selected edition of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor with Barbara Leckie. Her research interests include Victorian vocal and print cultures, urban investigation, Victorian education and prison writing, and, most recently, contemporary adoption narratives.
VISAWUS Representative
Dr. Diana Maltz (Department of English, Southern Oregon University)
Diana Maltz is a Professor of English at Southern Oregon University. She is the author of British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes: Beauty for the People, 1870-1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and the editor of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (Broadview Press, 2013). She has also published essays and articles on George Gissing, Oscar Wilde, Ouida, Vernon Lee, May Kendall, and the collaborative poets known as Michael Field. She is presently working on two monographs: one about the utopian forerunner to the Fabian Society, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the other about British aestheticism as a family culture.
Members At Large
Dr. Carla Manfredi (Department of English, University of Winnipeg)
Carla Mandfredi teaches Victorian literature and culture at the University of Winnipeg. Her research focuses on the global nineteenth-century with a special emphasis on the Pacific Islands. Her current project examines scientific and literary representations of Pacific atolls in the long nineteenth-century.
Dr. Vanessa Warne (Department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media; University of Manitoba)
Vanessa Warne teaches Victorian literature and Disability Studies at the University of Manitoba. For close to two decades, she’s enjoyed the collegiality and rich scholarly offerings of VSAWC conferences. She serves as the Forum Editor for Victorian Review and her research explores the cultural history of reading by touch.
Dr. Mary Elizabeth Leighton (Department of English, University of Victoria)
Mary Elizabeth Leighton teaches in the English department at the University of Victoria and has published on Victorian hypnotism, dance, and the periodical press. Her fruitful collaboration with Lisa Surridge has resulted in The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Ohio UP, 2018), The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832-1901 (2012), and other publications on Victorian literature. With several wonderful VSAWC colleagues, she co-edited Victorian Review for a decade, from 2006 to 2016. She is starting a new collaborative project with Lisa on pregnancy and Victorian fiction.
Dr. Andrea Korda (Department of Visual Art, University of Alberta)
Andrea Korda is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Faculty. She is co-organizer of the Crafting Communities project and the Prairie Art Network, co-curator of the online exhibit Photographies, and author of Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869-1891 (Ashgate, 2015). Her articles on nineteenth-century British visual and material culture have appeared in the journals Word & Image, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Network, Paedagogica Historica, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
Graduate Student Representatives
Shelby Steele (Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba)
Shelby Steele is a PhD student in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba, specializing in Victorian literature. Her interests include British literature, women writers, feminist and gender theory, and industrial fiction. She is a recipient of the University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship.
Meghann Robern (Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba)
Meghann Robern is a PhD student in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba. Her research is focused on how imperialism, colonialism, and white exceptionalism were reified into the dominant cultural imagination through speculative fiction and theology during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. She has an MDiv from the Claremont School of Theology and is a grant recipient of the University of Manitoba Margaret H. Tyler Award (2022) and the Canadian Unitarian Council Theological Education Fund Award (2023).
Past President
Dr. Ryan Stephenson (Department of English, Douglas College)
Ryan Stephenson is an instructor at Douglas College. His research focusses on Victorian popular literacy and the representation of reading and writing in a range of nineteenth-century prose, including educational texts, periodical literature, and fiction. His work appears in Victorian Review, The Gissing Journal, and Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination.
Past Webmaster (ex-officio)
Kailey Fukushima (Department of English, University of Victoria)
Kailey Fukushima is a SSHRC-funded master’s student in English at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include Victorian popular literature and culture, food studies, women’s writing, and the digital humanities. She works as a research assistant for the Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry project and was previously the project manager for Digital Dinah Craik.
Webmaster
Sonia Jarmula (Department of English, University of Calgary)
Sonia Jarmula is a graduate from the MA program in the University of Calgary’s English department. Her SSHRC-funded research focused on orphan girls in children’s literature. She worked as a research assistant for the Digital Dinah Craik Project and for the Map of Victorian Literary Sociability. In 2019 she was the lead conference assistant for the annual VSAWC conference, “Victorian Sociability”. She currently works as a copywriter.
