Miriam Al Jamil
is an independent researcher with interests in sculpture, women’s writing and material culture. The subject of her chapter is further explored in a forthcoming volume on travel writing; her study of a sculpture collection was published in Antiquity and Enlightenment Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives (Brill, 2020). She is active in The Burney Society UK, The Johnson Society of London and The Women’s Studies Group, 1558–1837, and is Fine Arts review editor for bsecs Criticks online platform. She has given online talks and published reviews and blogs both online and in journals such as the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Francesca Arnavas
is a cognitive narratologist and a specialist in Victorian and fantasy literature. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia, within the research group Narrative, Culture and Cognition. She has researched and published on Victorian literature (especially Lewis Carroll), cognitive narratology, and literary Victorian and postmodern fairy tales. Her first monograph, Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ and Cognitive Narratology: Author, Reader and Characters, was published by De Gruyter in 2021, within the Narratologia series.
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott
recently completed her PhD at the University of Portsmouth, examining the autobiographies of nineteenth-century magicians and representations of conjuring in Victorian literature. Her most recent publications can be found in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal. Her other research interests include contemporary Japanese literature, which she currently teaches at the City Literary Institute, and she was awarded a jsps Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2022 at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Silvia Bombardini
is a writer, researcher, lecturer and occasional film curator. She teaches at the London College of Communication, London College of Fashion, and at the Royal College of Art. Silvia is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University, where her research on shoplifting as a feminist practice is part of the erc-funded ‘Politics of Patents (pop): Re-imagining citizenship via clothing inventions 1820–2020’ project. Her interests include all forms of subversion in consumers’
Felicia Boyages
is a current PhD student at the University of Sydney, having recently completed an MPhil in Education (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature) at the University of Cambridge in 2020. The subject of her essay draws upon work from her MPhil dissertation and current PhD project. Felicia’s area of interest is the representation of women in children’s and young adult literature with a critical focus on female ‘bags’ and ‘containers’ as manifestations of female identity and behaviour. She has also recently written an article for Metaphor on a similar topic, ‘Caring and Carrying: The Bag of Female Experience’. In addition to her academic pursuits, Felicia has worked as an English teacher for over ten years at Sydney Grammar School, Sydney. Felicia is also the mother of three boys aged eight, five and three years old, and one girl aged three months, with whom she shares her interest and passion for literature.
Janette Bright
is currently working towards a PhD at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, looking at the London Foundling Hospital (c.1739–1820) – how it was conceived, established, and maintained despite major challenges and constant criticism. Prior to this, her master’s degree considered how the eighteenth-century children of the Hospital were educated and prepared for apprenticeship – the ultimate aim of the institution. Janette has been involved with historical research at the London Foundling Museum and Coram for exhibitions, displays and artist projects since 2004. In 2011 she co-authored An Introduction to the Tokens at the Foundling Museum. In addition, she works part-time as a Museum Assistant.
Céline Brossillon
is Assistant Professor of French at Ursinus College, USA. Her research focuses on the crisis of masculine identity at the end of the nineteenth century in France, and the connection between solitude and madness in French and Francophone literature. She is particularly interested in deviant behaviours as a result of over-extended isolation. She is the author of Le Taureau triste: La Solitude du célibataire de Maupassant [The Sad Bull: The Solitude of Maupassant’s Bachelor] published by cnrs Editions in August 2021 and the coeditor of a special issue of French Forum titled L’Amour des Morts: Love with
James Brown
is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where, with Samantha Ashenden, from 2013 to 2023 he ran an interdisciplinary research group devoted to guilt. He teaches film, theatre and literature. Publications include ‘Dynamic Impasse: Divorce and British film in the Mid Twentieth Century’, in Joanna Miles, Daniel Monks and Rebecca Probert, Eds., Fifty Years of the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (London: Hart, 2022); ‘Betraying Emotion: Guilt in the Emotional Economy of Whistleblowing’, in Agnes Arnold-Foster and Alison Moulds, Eds., Feelings and Work in Modern History (London: Bloomsbury, 2022); and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four and “The Possibility of Tragedy”’, Society, 59 (2022): 537–547.
Kathleen B. Casey
is Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University. Her areas of expertise include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women, gender, and sexuality, African-American history, and material culture. Her book, The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, was published in 2015. Casey has also published in Gender & History, Frontiers, and the Journal of American Culture and is currently completing her second monograph, a social and cultural history of the purse in America under contract with Oxford University Press.
Marija Dalbello
is a Professor of Information Studies at Rutgers University, USA. Her publications focus on text/image relations, history of the book and libraries, and sensoria of migration. She coedited Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings (2011) with Mary Shaw, A History of Modern Librarianship: Constructing the Heritage of Western Cultures (2015) with Wayne A. Wiegand, Reading Home Cultures Through Books (2022) with Kirsti Salmi-Niklander, Global Voices from the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition (2024) with Sarah Wadsworth, and several thematic issues. She is a past board chair of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.
Rituparna Das
is a faculty member in the department of English at Surendra Nath College for Women, Kolkata, India. She has a PhD from Calcutta University, has published
Anne Green
is Emeritus Professor of French at King’s College London, and a former Head of the kcl French department. From 2011 to 2017 she was President of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. Her publications have focused mainly on aspects of nineteenth-century French literature and culture – her books include Flaubert and the Historical Novel. Salammbô Reassessed (cup, 1982 & 2010), Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (Anthem, 2011), and Gustave Flaubert (Reaktion, 2017). More recently her work has taken a new direction with Gloves. An Intimate History (Reaktion Books, 2021).
Anna Jamieson
is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Birmingham. Her research has been awarded the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies annual President's Prize (2021) and has been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Alexandru Matei
is an Associate professor, Faculty of Letters, University of Transilvania, Braşov, Romania. He teaches modern/contemporary French culture and literature. His main research interests are Roland Barthes, contemporary French literature, and ecological thinking. He also translates books from French into Romanian (Bruno Latour, Roland Barthes, Michel Serres). He has published Jean Echenoz et la distance intérieure (Harmattan, 2013) and coedited (together with Christian Moraru and Andrei Terian) Theory in the Post-Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (Bloomsbury, 2021). His latest article is ‘Littérature orientée objet et puissances d’agir: Lucie Taïeb et Jean Echenoz’, Acta Romanica, 33 (2022): 73–89.
is an associate professor of English at Lumsa University, Rome. She holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies and has published on African literature in English and Gikuyu. She has also published on comparative literature and translation studies. She has a long-standing interest in supernatural literature. In 2020 she published an article on sentient houses ‘What Does a House Want? Exploring Sentient Houses in Supernatural Literature’ in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural.
Victoria Reid
is currently a mental health activist and freelance translator. Previously, she lectured in French at the University of Glasgow. She completed her PhD at the University of Reading in 2005 and published that work as André Gide and Curiosity (2009). She coedited Channel Packets: Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880–1940 (2012), and wrote therein the chapter, ‘Marcel Schwob and Robert Louis Stevenson: Encounters in Death and Letters’. A chapter on Gide and Wilde features in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010). She has also authored the article, ‘André Gide and James Hogg: Elective Affinities’ (2007).
Gaultier Roux
is a junior associate professor in the College of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Fudan University (Shanghai). Based in China since Autumn 2016, he conducts research on French Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on fiction, travel writing and orientalism. A specialist in the work of Pierre Loti, he has published several articles on the travel writer, as well as a critical edition of Les Derniers Jours de Pékin (Paris: Magellan & Cie, 2021), which is to be followed by an edition of Matelot (forthcoming, Vaumarcus (Switzerland): Voilier Rouge, 2024). A critical edition of Le Chancellor, by Jules Verne, will also come out in 2024 (Paris: Magellan & Cie).
Ellen Sampson
is an artist and material culture researcher whose work uses film, photography, performance, and writing, to explore the relationships between clothing, bodies senses and emotion, both in museums and archives and in everyday life. She is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Design at Northumbria University and was previously a curatorial fellow at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her book Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear was published by Bloomsbury in 2020 and she is currently working on her second monograph The Afterlives of Clothes.
As a academic, curator, research leader, coach and movement teacher, Carolyn Sargentson works between image and text, object and movement. Curious about how her own embodied experience with historic furniture at the v&a gave access to hidden histories of secret-keeping and surveillance, she extended her enquiry into the experience of eighteenth-century characters, both fictional and real. Her forensic explorations of French mechanical furniture, conducted in collaboration with her colleagues in museum conservation, have produced deep knowledge about the interior organisation, operation and meanings of these things. Carolyn coaches in museums and universities around personal and organisational leadership, institutional trauma and post-pandemic grief.
Naomi Segal
is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies, an Honorary Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge, a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques and a Member of the Academia Europaea. She represented the UK on the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation 2005–11. She is the author of 18 books, including monographs Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch (2009), André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy (1998), The Adulteress’s Child (1992), Narcissus and Echo (1988) and The Unintended Reader (1986). She is currently completing a monograph on replacement, to be published by Brill in 2023.
Katie Snow
is an early-career researcher working across the fields of art history, gender studies, and the history of medicine. Her interests lie in graphic satire, art and anatomy, and her work has been published in the Women’s History Review. Having recently completed her PhD at the University of Exeter, she is now working on her first monograph, which will examine over one hundred satirical prints featuring breasts and explore the social, cultural, and political contexts which gave rise to them.
Lynn M. Somers
is a scholar of modern and contemporary art specialising in postwar American sculpture, site-specific environments, and psychoanalytic theories of object relations. She has published numerous book chapters on these topics, and her first book, Transformative Objects and the Aesthetics of Play: Louise Bourgeois’s Sculpture, 1947–2000, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024. An active research presenter at interdisciplinary conferences in the US, UK,
Samuel Talcott
is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Having done graduate studies at DePaul University, he teaches courses that bring the insights of modern continental thought to philosophical questions raised by the pursuit of knowledge and its place in modern life. This approach is informed by his research, which focuses on introducing, interpreting, and extending the French tradition in historical epistemology, especially Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault. He is author, most notably, of Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).