Contributors to this Issue

William D. Brewer is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where he has taught since 1987. From 2017 through 2025 he served as the book review editor of European Romantic Review. His publications include Representing and Interrogating Dueling, Caning, and Fencing during the British Romantic Period (2025), Staging Romantic Chameleons and Imposters (2015), The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley (2001), and The Shelley-Byron Conversation (1994). He was the general editor of The Works of Mary Robinson (8 vols.) and has published editions of William Godwin’s novel St. Leon and Hannah Cowley’s comedy The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier.Mary Elizabeth Leighton is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada. She co-edited The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832–1901; co-edited Victorian Review (2006–16); co-authored The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Ohio University Press, 2019) and articles in Victorian Studies, Victorians Periodicals Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts, among other venues; and co-founded Crafting Communities (available online at <https://www.craftingcommunities.net>). With Lisa Surridge, her current project is Great Expectations: Pregnancy in Victorian Fiction, which includes a section for the Victorian Web on pregnancy and childbirth and a monograph.Lisa Surridge is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. She is author of Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (Ohio University Press, 2005); co-editor of the Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832–1901 (2012) and of Victorian Review from 2006–16; co-author of The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier (Ohio University Press, 2019); and author of articles on Dickens, Gaskell, Caird, Collins, and the Brontës. With Mary Elizabeth Leighton, her current project is Great Expectations: Pregnancy in Victorian Fiction.Jefferey Simons taught for thirty years in the Department of English Philology at the University of Huelva, Spain. His essays include “Dickinson’s Ear” (2017), “Dickinson’s Lyric Ornithology” (2019), “Dickinson’s Senses of Experience” (2020), “Dickinson’s Prosodic Music and the Songs on Death in Hamlet” (2021), and “Dickinson’s Prosodic Music: Subtlety and Exuberance” (2021). He also proposed the theme and was the lead local organizer of the Emily Dickinson International Society Conference “Dickinson and Foreignhood,” held at the College of Philology, University of Seville, in 2022. ***Michael D’Alessandro is Associate Professor of English and Theater Studies at Duke University. His articles have appeared in American Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Genre, Theatre Survey, and American Art. His first monograph, Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835–75 (2022), was released by the University of Michigan Press.Jessica Straley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of the book Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature and has published essays on feral children, murderous plants, vivisection and sensation fiction, disability and the zoo, and visual representations of dead girls from the Victorian period to today. She is currently working on a book about the uses (and misuses) of non-human animals as pedagogical props in the long nineteenth century.William A. Cohen is Professor of English and Associate Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Studies at the University of Maryland. He has published scholarship on the literature and culture of the Victorian period, including Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, and a number of articles on the affective dimensions of the French language in works by English-speaking authors.Jesslyn Whittell is a poet and newly-minted PhD in Los Angeles, where she teaches English and creative writing at Scripps College. Her research examines radical instruction and the information poetics of Romantic authors like Blake, Spence, Wedderburn, Shelley, Thelwall, and Barbauld. In addition to a 2022 article on Christopher Smart and eighteenth-century mechanical form in SECC, she has an article on Spence and the poetics of use forthcoming from Studies in Romanticism in 2026, and an article on Blake, Patrick Colquhoun, and the collusion of coal and police in Romantic London newly published in Humanities.