Contributors

HEATHER BARRETT … is a PhD candidate in English and American Literature at Boston University. Her dissertation investigates how nineteenth-century American works of fiction tell new stories about gendered bodies and the erotic relations between them by self-consciously transforming one of the gothic genre's most enduring motifs: the virginal, virtuous heroine pursued by a villain who lusts for sexual and socioeconomic power. She is completing this project as a fellow in the Boston University Center for the Humanities. She teaches courses on gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century America and on British, American, and international gothic fiction.

DAVID GRANT …is a professor in the Department of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1992 under the supervision of Professor Michael Millgate. He is the author of Political Antislavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s (University of Delaware Press, 2012). He has published articles on such writers as Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edith Wharton. He is currently working on a manuscript about party discourse and the antebellum editions of Leaves of Grass.

VALERIE SIRENKO …is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in law and literature, object studies and the nonhuman turn, transatlantic studies, and race and social justice in the United States. She has taught courses on human rights, rhetoric and composition, and race and justice in American literature. Her current research project examines the last will and testament as an imagined site of posthumous agency in nineteenth-century American law and literature. Her work suggests that the last will and testament, as both a text supposedly containing the deceased's intentions and a material object so often burned, lost, or otherwise destroyed in American fiction, demonstrates the value of complementing law and literature's methodological approach with the insights of the nonhuman turn's focus on the blurred boundary between subjects and objects.

Year in Conferences Contributors

MARLOWE DALY-GALEANO …is an assistant professor of English at Lewis-Clark State College, where she teaches courses in American literature and humanities. She first participated in YiC as a graduate student covering ALA. She is passionate about YiC as a platform for sharing new research, mentoring, and forming scholarly networks. This is her fourth year as YiC Director.

MLA

ERIC MOREL …is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. His dissertation tracks understandings of nature writing and literary fiction across nineteenth-century American literature to illuminate relationships between expectations about and responses to reading. With Erin James (Assistant Professor, University of Idaho), he is coediting a collection of essays bridging ecocriticism and narrative theory.

CLARE MULLANEY …is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US literature, disability studies, and material text and material culture studies. She is a 2016 recipient of the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies.

ALEXANDRA REZNIK …is a PhD Candidate at Duquesne University and the Word and Music Studies (WMS) Association Forum Coordinator. Her article "Popular Music & Colonial Violence in Bessie Head's A Question of Power" (Lamar Journal of the Humanities, 2017) brings postcolonial theory to a WMS lens. Her dissertation integrates WMS with critical race, feminist, and cultural studies to explore the power dynamics of black and white women performers in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cultural texts.

JAMES M. VAN WYCK …(Senior Advisor) is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University. He is at work on a literary history of US evangelicalism. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New England Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed.

C19

ANTHONY G. COHEN …is a master's candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. His research interests focus largely on nineteenth century American poetry, particularly the works of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville during the Reconstruction era. His interests extend to the digital humanities, and he has worked on various projects for Melville's Marginalia Online and, more recently...