Biographies

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• Biographies

Françoise Baillet is Professor of British History and Culture at Université Caen Normandie, France. Her research addresses the role of the periodical press in shaping class, gender, and national identities in nineteenth-century Britain. She has published several articles related to Victorian cultural history and print culture, taking a particular interest in aestheticized renderings of working-class life in the Illustrated London News and the Graphic. She is also the author of Visions and Divisions: Punch's Cultural Discourses and the Victorian Social Order, 1850–1880 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2022). Current projects include the digitization of the Punch Pocket Book.

Rob Breton is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. A Victorianist, he focuses on working-class and Chartist fiction. His latest book, The Penny Politics of Victorian Popular Fiction (2021), is with Manchester University Press.

Marysa Demoor, Senior Full Professor Emerita of Ghent University, is the author of Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum (2000) and editor of Marketing the Author (2004). With Laurel Brake, she edited The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century: Picture and Press (Palgrave, 2009) and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009). With Ingo Berensmeyer and Gert Buelens, she has edited the Cambridge Handbook to Literary Authorship (2019). Her most recent publications are A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements (Palgrave, 2022) and The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals (coedited with Cedric Van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck, 2023). With Andrew King, Andrew Hobbs, and Lisa Peters, she is currently engaged on a four-volume collection, Primary Sources on Nineteenth-Century Journalism: Geographies of Print.

Astrid Dröse is a Research Associate at the University of Tübingen. She received her PhD from the LMU Munich in 2015. Her research focuses on the German and European literary and cultural history of the early modern period and the age of Goethe, including periodical studies. In 2022 she completed her habilitation thesis, "Journalpoetik: Literatur und Medienwandel 1770–1840." She also held a summer 2023 substitute professorship at the University of Rostock. Her research is published in the Jahrbuch der Heinrich von Kleist and in edited volumes from Secessioj (Berlin and Zürich) and Aisthesis Verlag (Bielefield).

Barbara D. Ferguson currently teaches at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where she regularly integrates nineteenth-century literature and cultural legacy into any course she is assigned. Her scholarship primarily focuses on Victorian Britain's science and spiritualism, framed as oppositional epistemologies in much of the era's journalistic media but intersecting in more nuanced ways in its speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Review, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, and (In)Visible Culture.

Kristen Layne Figgins is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy at Mississippi University for Women. Her research focuses on how evolutionary science is adapted into transhistorical textual and visual media. She received her PhD in 2021 and is the coeditor of Boom or Bust: Narrative, Life, and Culture in the West Texas Oil Patch (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021).

Kristin E. Kondrlik is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Professional and Technical Writing minor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her research has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, and POROI: Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, and she coedited Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her research centers on agency and professionalism in writing by and about healthcare workers in the Victorian period and now, and she is currently working on a monograph about the use of illustration in children's books produced during the coronavirus pandemic.

Emma Liggins is Reader in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006), The British Short Story, coedited with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins (Palgrave, 2011), Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women's Fiction, 1850–1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014), and The Haunted House in Women's...