Beth Bevis Gallick
Beth Bevis Gallick completed her PhD in Victorian literature at Indiana University, where she taught in the English department and served as Managing Editor of Victorian Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of religious belief and literary form. Her dissertation, titled “The (Anti)social Life of Religious Conviction in Victorian Literature,” describes how Victorian ideas about the privacy of religious conviction disrupted and reshaped mid-century genres and modes such as realism, social-problem fiction, and spiritual autobiography. Since completing her PhD in 2018, she has worked part-time as a freelance editor (and around the clock as a new mom) while continuing her research and writing as an independent scholar.
Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Shuhita Bhattacharjee earned her PhD from the University of Iowa and is an assistant professor of English Literature and Gender Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts and an Adjunct Professor of Design in the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her research on Victorian literature, representations of gender and sexuality in popular culture, and the South Asian diaspora has appeared in English Literature in Transition, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Victorian Popular Fictions, as well as in essay collections. She recently published her first monograph titled Postsecular Theory (Orient Blackswan) that examines the way nineteenth-century literature comments on the gendered, colonial and racialised construction of the ‘secular’ in relation to the religious during a moment of high imperialism. She is currently at work on the second monograph with Routledge that deals with the fin-de-siècle representation of colonial idols. In the social sector, she has worked both nationally and internationally on sex education, gendered HIV-related violence, and sexual harassment.
Ilana Blumberg
Professor, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University
Professor Ilana Blumberg is the author of Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century England, as well as two memoirs concerned with the intersections of faith and modernity, Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American and Houses of Study: a Jewish Woman among Books. Houses of Study was the winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature and shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies, as well as the Moment Magazine Award for an Emerging Writer. She is currently at work on a spiritual life of George Eliot, titled “George Eliot: Whole Soul,” a project supported by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation. She teaches at Bar Ilan University and lives with her family in Jerusalem.
Joshua Brorby
Postdoctoral fellow, Department of English, Washington University in St. Louis
Joshua Brorby is a postdoctoral fellow in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on translation, religion, and secularity in the the Victorian period, from its novels and artists to its workaday translators and far-flung travelers. His dissertation, Faith in Translation: Rewriting Secularity in the British Empire, searches the translational projects that redefined faith and the secular in nineteenth-century Britain. With attention to George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, F. Max Müller, and English newspaper reports on religious uprisings in China, Faith in Translation centers on the people who labored to introduce religions unfamiliar to English readers, and whose translative programs shaped these faiths’ receptions. His work has appeared in Dickens Quarterly and Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700.
Savannah Chorn
Savannah Chorn is a PhD student in English at Baylor University, where she also earned her master’s degree. She teaches first-year writing courses and honors colloquia, and she serves as the graduate writing tutor at Brooks College. Her primary research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, religion, Victorian medievalism, and postsecularism, with an emphasis on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Amy Coté
Assistant Professor, Samford University
Amy is Assistant Professor of English at Samford University. Her early work on Victorian religion and literature was awarded the Hamilton Prize for best graduate student paper and was published in Victorian Review, and her work has more recently appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Her current research interests include novel theory and narrative form, religion and postcritique, and most recently, adoption and theology.
Karen Dieleman
Professor of English, Redeemer University
Karen Dieleman (PhD, McMaster) is Professor of English at Redeemer University. She is the author of Religious Imaginaries: The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter (2012). Her additional article publications on these poets and others, such as Emily Pfeiffer and Alice Meynell, similarly explore the complexities of religion and theology in their work.
Richa Dwor
Instructor of English, Douglas College
Richa Dwor is an Instructor in the English Department at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2015) and editor of the anthology Religious Feelings (Routledge Historical Resource on Victorian Religion and Literature, forthcoming 2020). In 2019/20 she was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her current work addresses Jewish travel writing and responses to slavery in the Anglo-Jewish novel.
Denae Dyck
Assistant Professor of English, Texas State University
Denae Dyck is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature. She is the author of Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2024). Her ongoing research focuses on late nineteenth-century women writers, alternative spiritualities, and periodical press networks. Her publications include articles in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, European Romantic Review, Christianity and Literature, and ARIEL.
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Assistant Professor in the English Department at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan
Kylee-Anne Hingston is Assistant Professor of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature, children’s literature, and disability in literature. Her book, Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Disease in Victorian Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2019) traces the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across seven decades of the nineteenth century and in six different genres, demonstrating how Victorian fiction articulates disability through narrative form as well as through narrative theme. Her current research project examines prominent mid-Victorian religious periodicals from various denominational backgrounds to uncover theology’s vital involvement in the Victorian conceptualization of disability and illness. She has published an article on theology, disability, and Victorian fiction with the Journal of Disability and Religion.
Esther Hu
Lecturer, College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, Boston University
Esther T. Hu serves on the faculty of Boston University, where she is a Fellow of the International History Institute. Also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, Professor Hu holds a Master’s and Ph.D. in English Literature and Language from Cornell University and a Master of Arts in Teaching (English) from Duke University. In the field of Victorian Literature and Religion, Professor Hu has published or forthcoming work in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Religion and the Arts, the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, and Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory. She is a manuscript referee for Victorian Studies. Professor Hu has presented nationally, internationally, and/or virtually on Christina Rossetti (graduate level Invited Talk), Charlotte Yonge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Charles Dickens, among other topics. Her current research project is on Victorian Missions and China.
Alyssa Q. Johnson
Assistant Professor of English, Charleston Southern University
Alyssa Q. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of English at Charleston Southern University. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Christianity and the Gothic in long-nineteenth-century British fiction, often coalescing around the vampire figure or representations of failed religion. Her work has appeared in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, the Journal of Dracula Studies, the Victorian Jewish Writers Project, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom. Her first book, Gothic Fanaticism: Protestant Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press.
Joshua King
Joshua King is Professor of English at Baylor University, where he is founding director of the Environmental Humanities Minor and has received federal and foundation grants for community-engaged learning across disciplines that advances local environmental and food justice. He is author of Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (2015) and coeditor, with Winter Jade Werner, of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019). He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on poetics, religion, print culture, and ecotheological and environmental perspectives in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keble, John Henry Newman, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among many others.
Mark Knight
Professor of Literature, Religion, and Victorian Studies, Lancaster University
Mark Knight is Professor of Literature, Religion and Victorian Studies in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of Chesterton and Evil (2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Emma Mason, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009), and Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel (2019), as well as various edited collections. Mark co-edits the New Directions in Religion and Literature book series for Bloomsbury, and is the General Editor of the journal Literature and Theology. He co-directed NEH seminars on religion, secularism and the novel with Lori Branch in 2016 and 2019, and is now in the early stages of a new book on Oscar Wilde and religion.
Charles LaPorte
Professor, University of Washington
Charles LaPorte is a scholar of poetry who specializes in the intersection of literature and religion. His monographs The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2021) and Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Virginia, 2011) show how secular modernity changes the meaning of poetry. With Lori Peterson Branch, he co-edits the new Elements in Literature and Religion since 1500 series for Cambridge University Press. He has also recently co-edited several special issues on the centrality of religion to modern literature in the journals Nineteenth-Century Literature (73.2 and 73.3), Victorian Review (46.2), and Modern Language Quarterly (83:4).
Timothy Larsen
McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and an Honorary Fellow, Edinburgh University. He has been a Visiting Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge, and All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006); A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011); The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (2014); and John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life (2018). He has also edited numerous books including The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions and, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (forthcoming 2020).
Sebastian Lecourt
Associate Professor of English, University of Houston
Sebastian Lecourt received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. His research focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularization, colonialism, and comparativism – often centering upon the emerging nineteenth-century academic study of religion. His first book, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018), considers a group of liberal intellectuals who debated whether religion was a matter of individual belief or of cultural identity, and shows how this distinction became central to liberal understandings of aesthetic agency. Sebastian is working on a second book project entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783-1927, which considers the role that literary form played in constructing the nineteenth-century canon of “world religions.” His essays have appeared in PMLA, Representations, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and other journals.
Michael Ledger-Lomas
Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian. He was formerly lecturer in the history of Christianity in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of King’s College London and is now based in Vancouver, BC. His publications include the edited volumes, Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2013), The Bible and Dissent in Britain, c. 1650-1950 (Oxford, 2013) and The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2017). He is currently completing a religious biography of Queen Victoria for Timothy Larsen’s Spiritual Lives series. He is also particularly interested in the intersection between religion and historical consciousness. Recent publications here include a forthcoming essay on Claude Reignier Conder’s heterodox life of Jesus, an essay in Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi, eds, Time-Travelers (Chicago, 2020) and introductions to new editions of William Smith’s dictionaries of the Bible and Christianity (IB Tauris and Bloomsbury).
Hee Eun Helen Lee
Hee Eun Helen Lee is an Assistant Professor at Taejae University in Seoul. She specializes in 19th-century British poetry, with research interests in musical aesthetics, religion, and botany. Her work has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Review19, and is forthcoming in Victoriographies. Her current project examines the cultivation and naturalization of exotic flora in Victorian Britain and its representations in poetry.
Alexander Lynch
Alexander Lynch is a PhD candidate in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. His research interests include nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, religion and literature, political theology, and the history and theory of criticism. His PhD dissertation examines the genesis of the ‘political miracle’ in nineteenth-century British literature and thought. His work has appeared in Dickens Studies Annual. His doctoral studies are supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership, Trinity College, and the University of Cambridge.
Krista Lysack
Professor of English at King’s University College (Western University)
Krista Lysack is Professor of English at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario (Western University). She is the author of Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Ohio University Press) and, most recently, Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading (Oxford University Press). She has also written articles and chapters on Victorian literature in its relations to religion and devotion; reading practices, attention, and temporality; shopping, consumer culture, and symbolic economies; women’s suffrage and print culture; and storms and meteorology. Her current research concerns new materialism, ecology, and weather in nineteenth-century British literature.
Emma Mason
Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Forthcoming and recent work includes Dialect Poems by William Barnes in the Dorset County Chronicle, with Tom Burton (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1810s (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018), plus articles on the religious writing of Dorothy Wordsworth, William Cowper, John Clare, and the contemporary poet, Peter Larkin. She is a board member of the powerofthewordproject.com and the journals Literature and Belief and Literature and Theology; and with Mark Knight, edits the Bloomsbury series, New Directions in Religion and Literature. Her current project explores women Catholic mystics at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.
Joseph McQueen
Associate Professor of English, Northwest University
Joseph McQueen is Associate Professor of English at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington. His articles on S. T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Oscar Wilde have appeared in Christianity and Literature, European Romantic Review, and SEL Studies in English Literature. He is currently working on a book that explores liturgy and secularization in Romantic and Victorian literature.
Patrick O’Malley
Professor of English, Georgetown University
Patrick R. O’Malley is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he teaches nineteenth-century British and Irish literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory. He is the author of two books: Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the best first book in Victorian studies from the Northeast Victorian Studies Association; and Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the Robert Rhodes Prize for the best book in Irish literary studies from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is also the author of a number of articles and essays on religion, sexuality, and literary historiography in the works of writers including Ann Radcliffe, Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, John Henry Newman, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, and James Joyce.
Elizabeth Travers Parker
Elizabeth T. Parker is Assistant Professor of English at Regent University. She holds both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature from Baylor University where she studied under Dr. Joshua King. Elizabeth’s research focuses on the experience of religious belief in nineteenth-century British poetry, although her interests extend to the development of devotional poetics from the early modern period to the end of the Victorian era. She is currently at work on a book project, Holy Spirit, Holy Dove: An Ecotheology of Birds in Victorian Poetics, which emerged from her dissertation work in ecopoetics and phenomenology. This project asks how the literary forms of religious devotion shape ecological conscience for Victorian writers. Elizabeth has been published in the Mark Twain Journal, the International Journal of Christianity and Education, and the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. She also published a book chapter on incarnational landscapes in children’s literature in The Christian Mind of C.S. Lewis. In addition to her current appointment at Asbury, Elizabeth has taught at Baylor University and the University of Kentucky.
Aubrey Plourde
Assistant Professor of English, University of Lynchburg
Aubrey Plourde is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Lynchburg. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and PMLA. She is currently working on her first book, “Recursive Hermeneutics and the Victorian Secular Imagination.” When she is not reading or teaching, she might be badly welding furniture, attempting to replicate authentic Lebanese food, or wrangling her three canine children.
Kristen Pond
Associate Professor of English, Baylor University
Kristen Pond teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature at Baylor University. Her research focuses on 1) key debates about epistemology and realism, 2) religion and ethics in the development of the novel, 3) gender and women’s writing. Her work appears in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Institute Journal, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Brontë Studies, Dickens Studies Annual, and Victorian Review. She has written entries for Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature and Palgrave’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers. Her current book project examines the figure of the stranger in Victorian narratives.
Joseph Stubenrauch
Associate Professor of History, Baylor University
Joseph Stubenrauch is an Associate Professor in the History department at Baylor University. He received his PhD from Indiana University in 2011. His first book, The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Stubenrauch’s research has focused on the intersections between nineteenth-century religion and print culture, consumerism, and urbanization. Currently, he is working on a book that examines the roles of religion and emotion in working-class autobiographies. He is also involved in a digital research project that seeks to represent the “map” of the world as encountered by British readers of domestic, religious periodicals.
Amanda Vernon
Amanda B. Vernon is a Teach@Tübingen Fellow at The University of Tübingen and an Honorary Junior Fellow of the University of Buckingham. Her research focuses on the relationship between literature and theology in the Victorian period, and has been published in Victorian Review and Victorians: A Journal of Literature and Culture. Her current project examines the role of theological discourse and spiritual practice in Victorian representations of therapeutic reading. Vernon is co-editor (with Daniel Gabelman) of Unsaying the Commonplace: George MacDonald and the Critique of Victorian Convention (Winged Lion Press, 2024) and is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to George MacDonald. Her monograph, Reading with the Trinity: Theology and Literary Form in George MacDonald, is under contract with Manchester University Press.
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Professor of English at Wesleyan University, studied at the University of Minnesota and Stanford University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century British poetry, including articles about political expression, print and oral cultures, and poetic representations of sensory experience. She is the author of Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford, 2014) and Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave, 2005). Her current research projects investigate poetry and music, including hymnody and psalmody; secular and sacred time; and literary experiments with the historicity and multiplicity of the English language.
Winter Jade Werner
Associate Professor of English, Wheaton College
Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (OSUP 2020) and, with Joshua King, co-editor of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (OSUP 2019). Currently, she is co-editing with John Wiehl a special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory on “Religion, Criticism, and the Postcritical.”
Ben Wiebracht
Instructor of English, StanfordBen Wiebracht is an English instructor at Stanford’s Online High School. He also teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature for the university’s Continuing Studies Program. His graduate dissertation and publications focus on the evolution of the love plot in English literature. His current project explores the gender dynamics of religious doubt in the Victorian period, with particular emphasis on Tennyson’s poetry and mid-century religious novels. Ben and his wife Michelle live in San Jose, California. They welcomed their first child in the summer of 2020.
Mimi Winick
Mimi Winick is Powell-Edwards Chair in Religion and the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her book project, Ecstatic Inquiry: Comparative Religion and the Secret History of Feminist Spirituality was recently supported by an ACLS Project Development Grant. She received her PhD in English literature from Rutgers University, and has been a research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and an inaugural fellow on the Transcendence and Transformation initiative at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Her essays have appeared in journals including Modernism/modernity, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and, with Winter Jade Werner, MLQ. She serves on the executive committee for the MLA’s Anthropology and Literature forum, the editorial board for the Political Theology Network’s Literature and Political Theology blog, and is a co-director of the Spirituality, Care, and Culture Lab, supported by VCU’s Humanities Research Center and the Center for the Study of Global Religions and Spiritualities.