Katharine Anderson
B.A. McGill; M.A.; UMass/Amherst; Ph.D., Northwestern University
Department of Humanities, Graduate Programs in History, Humanities, and Science & Technology Studies
research interests:19th century science and environment; voyage narratives and sea-writing; the maritime empire; Victorian material culture.
current projects: underwater, technology and the imagination in late 19thC and early 20thC; science museums.
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John Bell
English; Writing Department
research interests: The Victorian Novel, Frances Trollope, Dickens, the Brontës, social criticism in the novel, humour (comic and satiric) in the novel, same-sex and related gender issues in Victorian literature and culture
current project: the Frances Trollope website: http://www.yorku.ca/johnbell/trollope
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Ken Carpenter
B.A., U of Toronto; M.A., UC Berkeley; Ph.D., University of London
Department of Visual Arts
Tina Young Choi
A.B., Harvard; M.A., Ph.D., UC Berkeley
Department of English, Graduate Programs in English, and Science & Technology Studies
email <tinayc@yorku.ca>
research interests: the 19th-c. novel; urban literature; 19th-c. statistics and other sciences; Victorian material culture; 19th-c. information culture
current projects: mass-market maps and cartographic literacy, 1790s-1850s, especially with relation to contemporaneous visual and information culture
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Elicia Clements
PhD and MA in English Literature at York University
MA in English Literature, York University
BA (Honours) in English Literature , University of Western Ontario
BMus (Honours) in Music Education , University of Western Ontario
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities
email <elicia@yorku.ca>
research interests: interdisciplinary connections between the art forms of literature and music, aesthetics, the Decadent 90s, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, the late-Victorian composer Ethel Smyth.
current projects: book project on Modernist Literary Musics.
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Dorothy de Val
BMus, MA University of Toronto; PhD King’s College, London Graduate Program in Music
Musicology
email <ddeval@yorku.ca>
research interests: music in late Victorian and Edwardian England; the first English folk song revival; piano industry and piano culture throughout the 19th century; Broadwood family (pianos and folksong connections); Victorian music hall; Percy Grainger.
current projects: Gaelic song collecting in the late 19th and early 20thc (specifically Amy Murray); Gaelic song.
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James Elwick
B.A., Western; M.Phil., Cantab; Ph.D., U of Toronto
Science and Technology Studies Program
email <jelwick@yorku.ca>
research interests: History of life sciences; Victorian science; History and Philosophy of Science/Science and Technology Studies; Social and Intellectual History of Modern Britain
current project: ‘An Adopted Chinese Culture’: the Victorian Examination Mania and the Origin of League Tables, 1840-1890, studies the use of standardized examinations in British and Imperial education, and rewrites the history of educational achievement and meritocracy using tools from history and philosophy of science (HPS) and science and technology studies (STS).
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Margo S. Gewurtz
B.A., U of Toronto; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell
Department of Humanities (Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, as of July 2009); Graduate Programmes in Humanities, History, Women’s Studies
email <mgewurtz@yorku.ca>
research interests: Sino-Western cultural relations 19 and 20C with a special focus on Canadian missionaries in China and their Chinese co-workers. Late Victorian religion: Anglo-American missionary movement. Gender issues in China mission history.
current projects: The Canadian Mission in North Henan China, 1890-1937: Portraits of a Partnership. (book length ms); Kala Azar in China: Medicine and Empire in Asia, 1890-1949.
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Alison Halsall
B.A. (Honours), Carleton; M.A., Carleton; Ph.D., York University
Department of Humanities; Graduate Programs in Humanities, English, and Visual Arts
email <ahalsall@yorku.ca>
research interests: the 19th-c. novel; Victorian visual cultures; neo-Victorian adaptations; transmedia studies; comics and graphic narratives.
current projects: LGBTQ+ comics studies; children and youth as readers of graphic texts; comics for young readers.
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Lesley J. Higgins
B.A., Brock; M.A., Ph.D., Queen’s
Department of English; Graduate Programs in English, Humanities
email <19higgins55@gmail.com>
research interests:poetry; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Walter Pater; textual studies and editorial theory; late Victorian – Modernist literature and visual arts.
current projects: [a] Co-general editor of the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (9 vols., OUP), and editor of 3 volumes: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks (2015), Dublin Notebook (2014), and Oxford Essays and Notes. [b] With colleague David Latham, co-general editor of the Collected Works of Walter Pater(10 vols., OUP). [c] Developing a book-length study, Hopkins: Confessing the Flesh.
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David Latham
B.A. (Honours), Acadia; M.A., Toronto; Ph.D., York
Department of English and Graduate Program in English
email <dlatham@yorku.ca>
research interests: Pre-Raphaelite literature and art, Victorian poetry and culture.
current projects: Editor since 1994 of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, publishing in the spring and fall studies of Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent art, culture, and literature; Co-general editor with Lesley Higgins of The Collected Works of Walter Pater, a ten-volume edition scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press.
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Bernard Lightman
B.A., M.A., York U; Ph.D., Brandeis University; F.R.S.
Department of Humanities; Graduate Programs in Humanities, History, and Science and Technology Studies
email <lightman@yorku.ca>
research interests:19th c British science; science and popular culture; science and religion; scientific exhibitions and museums; scientific periodicals; transnational study of British and Chinese science
current projects:the correspondence of John Tyndall; global history of evolution and religion in the 19th century
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Scott McLaren
B.A., M.I.St., Ph.D., University of Toronto
York University Libraries; Graduate Programs in Humanities and History
email <scottm@yorku.ca>
research interests: religion and the book, 18th and 19th c. church history, Victorian Gothic fiction, George MacDonald.
current projects: monograph under contract with the University of Toronto Press titled A Reading People: Print Culture and the Methodist Struggle for Social Respectability in Upper Canada, 1800-1850; reassessment of John Wesley’s contribution to the development of denominational publishing in North America.
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Kim Michasiw
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., U of Toronto
Department of English
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Natalie Neill
Ph.D., English, York; M.A., Film Studies, Carleton; B.A., English and Film Studies, Carleton
Department of English; Graduate Program in English
email <nneill@yorku.ca>
current projects: 1) critical edition of Mary Charlton’s Rosella; 2) article on Gothic parody and Romantic feminism; 3) article on Poe’s satires on female writers
B.A. U Waterloo, MA and PhD University of Toronto
email <dneill@yorku.ca>
research interests: history of European expansion, medicine, capitalism and colonialism in Africa; Victorian culture, economics and gender
current project: a study of the Liverpool company John Holt & Co. across German, French and British colonies in western Africa between the 1860s and 1914
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Marlis Schweitzer
Ph.D., University of Toronto
Graduate Program in Theatre Studies (GPD); Graduate Program in History (Associated Member)
email <schweit@yorku.ca>
research interests: C19 and early C20 popular entertainment, fashion and beauty culture, transnational commodity culture, celebrity culture, theatre historiography, Performance Studies
current projects: Ambassadors of Empire: Child Performers and Colonial Audiences, 1835-1860 (a SSHRC-funded project) on the movement of child performers along global theatrical circuits; technological innovations (e.g. ocean liners, telegraphy, typewriters) and structural changes (e.g. reorganization of touring routes) that facilitated the rapid exchange of theatrical commodities (plays, performers, props, costumes, etc.) between Europe and North America in the late C19 and early C20
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Victor Shea
B.A., PEI; M.A., U of Toronto; Ph.D., York
Department of Humanities, Graduate Programs in English, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Studies
email <vshea@yorku.ca>
research interests: Victorian Literature and Culture; Victorian Imperialism; Critical Theory.
current project: Victorian Literature: An Anthology (Blackwells, 2011).
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Ann B. (Rusty) Shteir
B.A., Douglass; Ph.D., Rutgers
Women’s Studies and Humanities, Graduate Programs in Women’s Studies, Humanities, English, and History
email <rshteir@yorku.ca>
research interests: women and botany, historical and cultural perspectives on women, nature, and science; gender and science; 18th and 19th century women’s studies; women’s popular science writing 18th and 19th century; and mythology and visual culture.
current project: a study of four elite women in 1820s-30s British North America who collected plants in Quebec and Newfoundland for W. J. Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-40).
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Karen Stanworth
BFA (Concordia), BEd (McGill), MA (York), PhD (Manchester)
Art History and Education
email <kstanworth@edu.yorku.ca>
research interests: visual culture and pedagogy; higher education and the arts; feminist cultural theory and production; and narrative and history. Visibly Canadian: Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1830-1910 is a major study on visual culture and identity in 19th century, Victorian Canada which examines the ways in which visual culture participates in the construction and mediation of social identities, particularly in early museum pedagogies, visual spectacle and the representation of group identities.
Current research initiatives also include curatorial work on issues in queer archives in collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives of Canada (CLGA). She is also working on a series of case studies about bawdy images in 20th century Canada.
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William Whitla
B.A., Toronto; M.A., Toronto; S.T.B., Trinity College, Toronto; D. Phil., Oxford (Merton College)
Department of English; Department of Humanities (Retired: Senior Scholar)
email <wwhitla@gmail.com>
research interests: Victorian literature and culture, Victorian religious and social history, and Victorian art and aesthetics; literary theory; medieval and Renaissance literature and culture.
current projects:Pugin, Barry, and the Nature of Gothic; “William Morris and the Classical Tradition” in The Routledge Companion to William Morris (2021); Victorian Literature: An Anthology (Blackwells, 2011), with Victor Shea; The English Handbook (Blackwells, 2010); a study of translation theory and practice in the nineteenth century, including the Matthew Arnold/Francis Newman controversy over the translation of Homer; Anglo-Norman and Irish Illumination in Gospel and Apocalypse books, 800-1200 CE.
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Mary F. Williamson
B.A., M.A., M.L.S., University of Toronto
York University Libraries (retired, Fine Arts Bibliographer); Adjunct Faculty, Graduate Art History
email <mfw@yorku.ca>
research interests: cookery and food of the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in Canada; book illustration in 19th century Canada.
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