Middlemarch 150th Anniversary Symposium – Bios

  1. Sierra Eckert (Princeton University) | Research Presenter
  2. Sierra Eckert is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s Center for Digital Humanities and a Perkins Fellow at the Humanities Council. Sierra defended her dissertation in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in July 2020. She is currently working on a book project entitled, The Research Aesthetic: Information and the Form of the Victorian Novel and a second project on quantitative methods and disciplinary history. As a practitioner and historian of digital humanities, her work examines the literary significance of systems of information and labor, from the nineteenth century to the present. Her research and teaching in digital humanities include quantitative textual analysis, data visualization, archive and manuscript studies, and critical approaches to metadata, statistical modeling, and the intersection of print and digital collections.
  3. Laura Griffith (University of Washington) | Research Presenter
  4. Laura Griffith is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Washington. Her dissertation examines the religious lives of women in the novels of George Eliot and Charlotte Mary Yonge. She edited the collection From Realism to Reserve: Undergraduate Essays on Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, 2020), and she has two entries related to Yonge forthcoming in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing (ed. Lesa Scholl).
  5. Alex McCauley (University of Washington) | Research Presenter
  6. Alex McCauley teaches literature and composition at the University of Washington. He is thinking about the world.
  7. Matt Poland (University of Washington) | Research Presenter
  8. Matt Poland is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Washington. His dissertation, “The Global Remediation of Charles Dickens and George Eliot,” explores the transnational and transtemporal circulation of Victorian fiction through books, newspapers, and archives. His article, “Commemorative Print: Serialized Monuments during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Debates,” was recently published in Journal of Victorian Culture. Matt is a contributing editor to At the Circulating Library, and he currently serves as a grad student representative to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
  9. Ronjaunee Chatterjee (Concordia University) | Keynote Speaker
  10. Ronjaunee Chatterjee is the editor of the Norton Critical Middlemarch (expected 2023). Her first book, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2022, under contract with Stanford UP), argues that there are figurations of the feminine across literary genres in the nineteenth century that are not accessible through the frameworks of liberal individualism. Her book studies the various epistemic crises of the nineteenth century, especially those of racial and gendered embodiment, and offers the term singularity instead to describe a model of subjecthood grounded in what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely “alone.” With Alicia Christoff and Amy Wong, she co-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Her articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in differences, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. She teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.
  11. Fionnuala Dillane (University College Dublin) | Eliot on Demand
  12. Fionnuala Dillane is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at University College Dublin. She has published widely on Marian Evans’s journalism, most recently in the Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, eds Nancy Henry and George Levine (2019); Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Joanne Shattock (2017); and Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s, eds Alexis Easley et al. (2019). Her monograph, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press was joint winner of the Colby Book Prize in 2014. She is co-editor of 5 collections of essays on Irish culture and the Vice-President (2020-22) of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.
  13. Nancy Henry (University of Tennessee Knoxville) | Eliot on Demand
  14. Nancy Henry is the Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of George Eliot and the British Empire (2002), the Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (2009), the Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (2012) and, most recently, Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment (2018). She has co-edited the Cambridge Companion to George Eliot 2nd edition (with George Levine, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture and George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. She is currently working on a book about horses in Victorian literature and culture.
  15. Summer Star (San Francisco State University) | Eliot on Demand
  16. Summer Star is an associate professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches courses on 19th-Century British literature. She has published articles on the works of Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, and, of course, George Eliot. She is working on a manuscript on the relationship between realism and the aesthetic dimensions of economic theory and practice in the mid-Victorian novels.

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