Current Editors

Jordan Green is an M.A. literature student focusing on British Romantic literature at the University of Alabama. Her current research interests include nineteenth century Gothic literature, and Romantic women’s scientific writing and poetry. She is currently writing her thesis which will examine late eighteenth century women authors’ treatment of contemporary “popular science” theories and public experiments in fiction, specifically focusing on the figure of the quack electromagnetic therapist. Jordan can usually be found cuddling with her spooky black cat, Byron, or meandering through antique stores looking for pieces for her dream haunted mansion. She is serving as one of the American co-chairs for the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus.

Sigmund Jakob Michael Stephan

Sigmund Stephan is pursuing a PhD in German Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. His main research area is Romantic ecopoetics and zoopoetics. Since March 2019, he is serving as the Canadian Co-Chair of the NASSR Graduate Student Caucasus. He works toward connecting graduate students and early-career scholars in North-America and beyond.

Holly Horner is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Literature focusing on British Romantic literature and Digital Humanities. Her research interests include the nineteenth-century gothic novel, Romantic women poets, and digital applications to literary studies. Most recently, her work on Charlotte Smith has been featured in Tokyo, Japan for The Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH) and Birmingham, Alabama for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). In her spare time, she can be found spoiling her dog Belle or playing any Nintendo games.

Past Writers

Hanna Warsame is a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, pursuing her MA in English. Her research focuses on Wael Hallaq’s revision of Edward Said’s classical text Orientalism, as it applies to Romantic literature of the long eighteenth-century. With special interests in the French Revolution debate and print culture, her research examines the influence of Eastern and Islamic culture on the politics and morality of first generation Romantics such as Byron and Shelley. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Master’s award for her research proposal in British Romanticism and the Ottoman Empire.

Tabinda Khan is a first year PhD candidate in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include nineteenth century British Literature with a focus on women writers like Austen, Edgeworth, Owenson and Shelley in relation to the expanding British colonialism, specifically in the Indian subcontinent. She hopes to expand her research in topics connected to travel writing, immigration and displacement in 19^th century texts and investigate the effects of displacement on an individual’s identity and conscience in the form of emotional trauma. These topics are closely connected to the lives and identities of immigrants living in the West in the contemporary era and hence weave a complex thread between the social and cultural issues of then and now. Her MA Thesis focused on the value and perception of Austen’s novels in the contemporary era by investigating the aspects of empowerment and assertiveness for women in Pride and Prejudice and its 2008 television adaptation called Lost in Austen.

Stephanie Edwards is the Managing Editor of the NGSC blog and a PhD student in the department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Before starting at McMaster, she received her HBA in Anthropology from Lakehead University. Her research interests include dymythologizing the canon, phenomenology and film studies. Currently in its early stages, her dissertation looks at the disappearance and circulation of blackness in Romantic literature and scholarship . In her spare time, you can find her either watching Netflix or tweeting (@stephanieadele_), always with a coffee (or glass of wine) in hand.

Sarah Faulkner is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. She is currently working on a dissertation on Jane Porter, British women’s historical/national novels of the early nineteenth century, women’s authorship networks, and print culture.

Sarah also teaches 200-level courses for the English program, is the Lead Coordinator for the 18/19C Graduate Research Cluster, an Assistant Director of the Expository Writing Program and Liaison to the UW in the High School Program, and the Organizer of JaneFest 2017.

Chris Kelleher is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, a Junior Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. As a member of the Second Cities of Empire research group based in the University of Glasgow, Chris has engaged in archival research between the UK and India over the past three years. Emerging from this research, Chris’ dissertation examines the circulation of Romantic literature between nineteenth-century Britain and Bengal, and its historical intersections with the globalization of economic debt under the auspices of Empire. Chris also teaches introductory poetry courses at the University of Toronto, co-organizes his department’s nineteenth-century reading group along with Works in Nineteenth-Century Studies (WINCS), and competes fiercely on the department’s volleyball team, “The Court Jesters.” His work appears in English Language Notes. Follow Chris on Twitter: @clymank.
Lillian Lu is a PhD student in the English Department at UCLA. Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century British literature, Orientalism, the Gothic, and the theorization of innocence. In 2017, she served as Co-Chair of the UCLA English Marathon Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Later this year, her personal essay, “Cartographies of Myself” will appear in the anthology Shades of Prejudice: Asian American Women on Colorism in America (NYU Press). Outside of academia, she is a classically trained soprano and a (self-trained) musical theatre enthusiast.
Samantha Ellen Morse is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of California: Los Angeles. She specializes in British literature in the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the Gothic.She is in the early stages of writing her prospectus, which aims to theorize the affect of dread as it relates to a Gothically-conceived future. Outside academia, Samantha competes in triathlon and is a two-time Ironman finisher.
Emily Rupp is an M.A. student in literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and she is also the 2018-2019 President of IUP’s English Graduate Organization (EGO).  Her research interests include Romanticism, the Gothic, and gender studies/queer theory.  She is currently planning out a thesis which will most likely based around Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and depictions of (queer?) female desire.  Emily is usually found around public with some kind of coffee in hand, but at home she likes to relax with a cup (or two or three) of tea.  You can find her trying to learn how to twitter here: @em_rupp.
Caroline Winter is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.  Her area of research is British Romantic literature, and her interests include digital humanities, literature and economics, Romantic print and popular culture, women’s writing, and the Gothic. She is writing a dissertation about Gothic economics, investigating Gothic representations of Romantic economic theory as well as the economics of reading and writing Gothic literature. Follow her on Twitter @editrixcaroline.

Talia Vestri Croan is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Boston University, with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She teaches undergraduate literature and composition courses in her home department and in BU’s College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. She also serves as Senior Editorial Assistant for Studies in Romanticism.  Talia’s research engages Romantic and Victorian lyric poetry, nineteenth-century novels, cultural histories of the family and marriage, queer theory, and film studies. In her dissertation, Talia looks at how Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Austen, Baillie, and the Shelleys use literary representations of sibling kinship to construct relational models of subjectivity and selfhood. Drawing on her research in family studies, she designs courses that trace connections across genre and time, linking Pride and Prejudice to The Royal Tenenbaums, Fun Home to Washington Square.

Catherine Engh is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Her master’s thesis drew a connection between Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Ann Radcliffe’s Italian as it sought to recover the centrality of the heroine’s body to the eighteenth century seduction plot. Currently, Catherine is interested in how anxieties about luxury, trade and speculation link up with representations of feminine self-display in Jane Austen and the visual art of her time. Another research project focuses on how nature poets in the romantic period registered their affective experience of the catastrophic transformation of English rural life in poetic form. Related interests include histories of trans-Atlantic slavery, capitalist modernity and enclosure, the aesthetic philosophies of the Romantic period and theories of character in realist fiction. Catherine is looking forward to teaching Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson and Austen this coming academic year. Tweet her @ceramicbathtub.

Conny Fasshauer is a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is particularly interested in women’s Gothic fiction, ranging from roughly the 1780s to the 1850s, and she has taught undergraduate courses in eighteenth-century British literature. Her research during her MA (also at CU Boulder) primarily concerned representations of Obeah, a religion common among Caribbean slaves in the Romantic period, in works by William Earle, Jr., Victor Hugo, and Maria Edgeworth.

Amy Gaeta is the early stages of the PhD track program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison  She first become interested in the British Romantic Period  and Romanticism as a transhistorical force in Boston, MA, where she grew up and completed undergrad work. Experience in the visual artist and punk scenes inform her understanding of Romantic identity as extending from Blake to Keats to contemporary art and poetry. The University’s vast and unique resources make UW-Madison the perfect space to explore a wide range of interests that don’t seem to fit. Primarily, her work focuses on the intersecting threads between Romantic philosophy, contemporary visual culture, Queer Theory, and Punk. Current projects include an in-depth analysis of the Keatsian process of soul-making in concert with neo-Hegelian recognition, and the destructive aspects of fantastical thought. Besides this work she continues to posit Romanticism as a vital part of culture and politics today. In her free time you can find her practicing yoga, petting strangers’ dogs in public, and mentally preparing for Wisconsin winters.
Jacob Henry Leveton is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University.  Leveton served as Co-Chair of the NGSC from 2013-2017.
Leveton’s research examines conditions associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism and the corresponding rendering of all forms of life—human, animal, and environmental—precarious. His historical interests emanate from British Romantic visual and literary culture, generally, and center upon William Blake’s relation to British institutions of artistic production, more specifically. However, he retains wider conceptual commitments to critical theory, ecocriticism, and animal studies. In this aspect of his work, he aims to reflect upon the historiography and conditions of Art History as a necessarily interdisciplinary practice, and envision how contemporary critical thought across the disciplines might illuminate new methods and approaches to the interpretation of art. In 2014, he was curator of the modern art exhibition Ecological Looking: Sustainability and the End(s) of the Earth, at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. His essay on William Blake and abstract expressionism appears in William Blake in the Age of Aquarius (Princeton UP, 2017). A second essay on Blake, the emergence of lithography in the early nineteenth century, and the politics of pacifism is forthcoming in Essays in Romanticism. Tweet him @JacobHLeveton.
Nicole Geary (NGSC 2015-2016 Artist in Residence) is an artist working predominantly in printmaking and sculpture. Her work is informed by an interest in geology and combines documentation of history, both human and geological, with personal experiences. Geary earned a BFA from the University of Florida and an MFA from the University of South Dakota, both with a focus in printmaking. Her research activities include feminist art and labor, heterotopias, space, and uniformitarianism as it applies to human memory. She has exhibited in juried shows nationally at venues including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Spudnik Press Cooperative, and Washington Printmaker’s Gallery. She currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas and is a selected participant in Artist Lab at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. Tweet her @nicolegeary.

Cailey Hall is a PhD student in the English department at UCLA. She
is beginning work on a dissertation that explores the concept of digestion (as somatic process and as metaphor) in Romantic literature. Her other research interests include food studies, fan cultures, the Gothic, author afterlives, gender studies, and Samuel Johnson.

Renee Harris holds an M.A. in literature from the University of Arkansas, and is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in nineteenth-century British literature at the University of Kansas, where she also teaches introductory courses in poetry.
Renee’s dissertation examines Keats’s participation in the Leigh Hunt circle, as she seeks to understand how this context (his relationship with other artists, his identification with and later distinction from the “Cockney School”) informed his conception of poetic identity, vocation, and art as cultural work. Renee is the president of KU’s Nineteenth-Century Studies Reading Group, and her article “Our Material Selves: Imago and Social Exchange In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” can be found in the Spring 2013 volume of The Humanities Review.

Arden Hegele was the Managing Editor of the NGSC blog from 2014–2016, and is now an advisor to the NGSC board. She completed her  Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2016, and is now a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia. Her project, Reading Autopsy: The Medical Practice of Romantic Literature, argues that Romantic literature employs formal 

Tanja Jurković holds an MA in English and French language and literature from the University of Zadar, Croatia. Her main research interests are Grand-Guignol, the French theatre of horror and the identity of the monstrous in the European horror film, focusing on the Balkans. She is a contributor to the Gothic Imagination Blog, hosted by the University of Stirling, she also contributed to the International Gothic Association Postgraduate Blog, and is currently working on a couple of articles on Balkan horror film. She is also preparing for a PhD in Film, Media, covering the monstrous identities in the European (Balkan) horror film.

Adam Neikirk is a Master’s student in English at Westfield State University, where he also tutors for the Banacos Academic Center. His thesis seeks to augment the burgeoning field of cognitive poetics (a field at the intersecti

on of cognitive science and literary criticism) by studying Coleridge’s marginalia as an example of conceptual blending (for more on conceptual blending, see Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think). Adam is also a poet and musician whose primary intellectual interests include creativity, philosophy of mind, and ecocriticism. He is in the process of publishing a volume of poetry inspired by Coleridge and Romanticism via Des Hymnagistes Press. Tweet him @AdamNeikirk.

Deven Parker is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While completing her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, she studied Keats’s poetics of radicalism in his draft manuscripts. Her archival research led her to her current interests: her dissertation focuses on the connection between forms of Romantic self-consciousness, genre, and media in the period.

Grace Rexroth is a second-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also teaches introductory courses in women
‘s literature. Her research interests include British Romanticism and early Victorianism, media studies, print culture, political economy, and the cultural history of emotions. Her dissertation prospectus currently proposes a link between Romantic theories of memory and self-hood, the uneven rhetoric(s) or liberalism, and the shifting emotional connotations of the word “loneliness” in Romantic and early Victorian literature.

Joshua Ryan Smith is often referred to as Jammer, and there are many people to this day who don’t know his actual first name.  While he is predominantly a creative writer, his passion is reading and writing in whatever form and he hopes to begin teaching composition sometime within the next year. Jammer is actually an Americanist with an emphasis on Mark Twain; however, his first English professor in college was a Romanticist and instilled in him a deep passion for the period and the great writers of the time.  He has taught upper as well as lower division literature courses at the University of Texas at Tyler, and regularly writes for his own blog White Tower Musings which attempts to show how literature can be relevant for those living in contemporary society.  He believes that literature is not just for people who wear smoking jackets, have three PhDs, and regularly read The New Yorker (though they’re welcome to enjoy it as well), it’s for any and all human beings who desire to question what it means to be human and what are our basic motivations.

Christopher Stampone is a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University who is finishing a dissertation on modes of romance and transatlantic Romanticism. His work has recently appeared in Studies in American Naturalism, Early American Literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Chaucer Review, Explicator, and African American Review.You can find him on Twitter @CStampone and on Academia.edu: https://smu.academia.edu/ChristopherStampone.

Andrew Welch is a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University Chicago. His dissertation explores representations of death and dying refracted through questions of gender, sexuality, and self-sovereignty in Romantic-period writing.

Seth Wilson is a Graduate Student at the University of Texas at Tyler pursuing an MA in English, after which he hopes to enter a doctoral program elsewhere. He already holds an M.St. in History from Oxford University, where he studied cultural transmission in Old Saxon gospel translations. After some unprofitable time in the business world, he has returned to academia with a focus on Romantic literature, which inspired his interest in history in the first place. His current research interests revolve around cultural reception of Romanticism, including the fantasy genre’s use of Romantic visions of the imagination, and Transatlantic Romanticism. He is legally blind and lives with his retired guide dog.