Comments & Queries

Comments & Queries are welcome via email: victstu@indiana.edu.

Please also follow us on Facebook at Victorian Studies, on Twitter @victstudies, and on Instagram at victorian_studies.

Changes at VS:

With this volume, we must say a fond goodbye to two excellent VS editors. Richard Allberry, former Managing Editor, misses working alongside his colleagues in the office, misses missing working alongside his colleagues while working for VS remotely, and, of course, misses his strictly unidirectional engagement with VS's steady supply of baked goods. He is at work on his dissertation, which attributes the Victorian ostensible aversion to and marginalization of gambling to cultural anxieties surrounding changing, slippery conceptions of causality, and examines the formal affordances these conceptions made available to novelists such as George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot.

Since completing her tenure as Book Review Editor, Sara Loy has been working on her dissertation, "Practice Imperfect: Agential Repetition in the Golden Age of Children's Literature." She currently teaches a class on vampires and gender/sexuality. Despite the ongoing crises engulfing the world, she finds solace in the wit, verve, and poise of her past VS colleagues, lifelong friends who bake and edit with equal brilliance.

Christie Debelius has taken over as Managing Editor. Her research explores theories of media in the writing of Romantic women poets, and she hopes to take advantage of the fall weather to finish drafting the final chapter of her dissertation, on Charlotte Smith's writing for children, at outdoor coffee shop tables. In between bouts of writing and of fending off dangling modifiers, Christie has been working to perfect her croissant-baking technique, a pursuit ever frustrated by her cat Sherlock's attempts to steal baked goods off of the counter.

Samantha Heffner is taking over this year as Book Review Editor. This fall, she has begun work on her dissertation, which is currently titled "Sympathy for Lilith: Narratives of Murderous Women in Victorian Fiction." She has continued to hone her skills as a knitter of sweaters over the last year, and she enjoys spending as much time as she can with her lovely feline friend Lulu.

Anne Boylan is delighted to join Victorian Studies as Assistant Managing Editor. Though she is not yet writing her dissertation, her current research centers on gender and sexuality and narrative theory, exploring what happens when we refigure narrative silences in Victorian novels into agential acts rather than passive failures of speech.

Sarah J. Schmitt joined Victorian Studies this fall as the Assistant Book Review Editor, and she is delighted to be part of such a great team. Her research focuses on women writers of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. When not at the office, you can usually find her trying out new bread recipes in the kitchen—with varying results.

This fall we've had the pleasure of welcoming two outstanding undergraduate interns into the VS office. Molly Hayes is a senior majoring in English. In addition to interning with Victorian Studies, she has interned with Indiana Review and has also written for the Indiana Daily Student. Although she isn't entirely sure about her plans for the future, she is considering pursuing a Master of Library Science or perhaps working in publishing. Katie Orick is a junior pursuing an English Education major and a Spanish minor. In addition to her internship at Victorian Studies, she is a research assistant in the department of Sociology and is involved in several on-campus clubs. Her experience with the Victorian Studies journal has been an invaluable and enjoyable experience, and she hopes to pursue her many interests in the fields of literature, education, and sociology throughout the remainder of her academic and professional careers.

As always, Victorian Studies thanks the Indiana University Honors College, without whose generous support our internship program would not be possible.

________

On the Cover is an engraving of John Collier's painting The Priestess of Bacchus that appeared in the Magazine of Art in 1878. The image comes from an Internet Archive version of a copy in the collection of the Getty Research Institute.