Frank Kearful is Professor of English at Bonn University, where he has taught since 1974. He has been a visiting professor at Tübingen University and Hamburg University, and before moving to Germany in 1972 he was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He has written numerous articles on twentieth-century American poetry, is editor of The Robert Lowell Newsletter, and since 2003 he has written the annual chapter on American poetry since the 1940s for American Literary Scholarship.

Updated July 29, 2011

Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World:  Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies.

Updated: March 20, 2016

January 2011: Kent Puckett is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.  He is author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford University Press, 2008).

January 2011: Irina Ruppo Malone is a graduate of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Trinity College Dublin, and National University of Ireland, Galway, where she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship funded by the Irish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and has taught courses on Irish literature and theatre. She is the author of Ibsen and the Irish Revival (Palgrave, 2010).

June 2011: David Paroissien, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Professorial Research Fellow, University of Buckingham, edits Dickens Quarterly and co-edits The Dickens Companion Series with Susan Shatto. He has contributed two volumes to the series (Oliver Twist and Great Expectations) and has recently edited A Companion to Charles Dickens (2008), a series of essays contributed by Dickensian scholars from around the world, designed to place Dickens’s writing in its literary and historical context. He is currently working on a project related to Dickens’s political views and his writing about history.

Jeffrey Wallen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).  In addition to writing about the current conflicts and debates in the university, he has published widely on nineteenth-century European literature. His essays have appeared in Yale Journal of Criticism, ELH, Diacritics, Word & Image, College English, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and other journals. His most recent publications include "Migrant Visions: The Scheunenviertel and Boyle Heights, Los Angeles," "Narrative Tensions: The Eyewitness and the Archive," "Falling Under an Evil Influence," "From the Archives" (co-written with Arnold Dreyblatt), and "Sociable Robots and the Posthuman." He is currently working on a study of the archive in contemporary thought and art.

Updated February 19, 2011

June 2011: Adina Ciugureanu is Professor of English and American literature and culture at Ovidius University Constanta. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Director of the Research Center for Cross-Cultural Studies and editor of the Annals of Ovidius University (the Philology Series). She is President of the Romanian Association for American Studies (RAAS), affiliated to the European Association for American Studies (EAAS), and member of the Romanian-German Academy. Her major publications include Modernism and the Idea of Modernity (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2004, reprinted 2008), Victorian Selves (Constanta: Ovidius University Press, 2005, reprinted 2008), Post-War Anxieties (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2006), The Boomerang Effect (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2002, translated into Romanian and republished in 2008, Iashi: Institutul European) and numerous articles.

At the 2008 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers conference (BWWC), Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, and Susan Stanford Friedman presented the opening-night plenary panel devoted to mapping feminist scholarship’s current priorities and concerns. Conference participants reported being both intrigued and perplexed by the speakers’ seemingly bleak view of “women writers” as a useful scholarly category. This essay, conducted by the authors as a year-long email conversation, extends that plenary discussion. In addition to sketching the intellectual history of feminism within the American academy and assessing how Women’s Studies (broadly defined) engages with a host of pressing interdisciplinary concerns, the authors also revisit their discussion of what defines and justifies continued work on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers.

June 2010: Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  Her publications in the area of gender and culture include Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993); Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003); and articles in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Feminist Studies, PMLA, and New Literary History.  She writes frequently on Jane Austen and is editor of the Norton Critical Northanger Abbey (2004).  Her thoughts about the “new” Women’s Studies are elaborated in South Atlantic Review (2008).  She is currently writing about marginal versions of domesticity (queer, post-traumatic, feminist, homeless, etc.).

June 2010: Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2009, she received the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies. She is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies; Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.; and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. She edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, and (with Rachel Blau DuPlessis), Signets—Reading H.D. A Special Issue on Comparison of New Literary History edited with Rita Felski has just appeared, and Contemporary Women’s Writing, an Oxford University Press journal she co-edits, won the 2009 award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, Serbian, and Hungarian. She is at work on books on planetary modernisms and on migration narratives.

June 2010: Miranda M. Yaggi is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, specializing in the 18th- and 19th-century British novel and women writers. She is at work on her dissertation, "Architects of a Genre: Literati, Critics, and the British Novel's Critical Institution," which revises the traditional narrative that features print-journalism at the heart of the novel's "rising" professional institution and proposes, instead, to account for the early institution's heterogeneric and heteroglossic nature.

This essay analyzes Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in relation to the 1856 murder trial thought to have inspired it: that of William Palmer, the notorious “Rugeley Poisoner,” a physician accused of poisoning his patients under the guise of medicating them. While most critics have followed Collins’s lead in emphasizing the format of the legal trial – specifically, its sequence of testifying witnesses – as the inspiration behind the novel’s then-innovative rotating cast of narrators, for Tucker, the Palmer trial illuminates The Woman in White as much by way of its status as a revelatory moment in the history of modern anatomical medicine as it does as a moment in British legal history. The difficulty of definitely distinguishing between clinically salutary medicating and criminal poisoning that made Palmer’s crimes possible and their prosecution vexing also served to point up some fundamental contradictions at the heart of anatomical medicine’s claim to be able to diagnose what goes on in the interiors of sick patients’ bodies, claims that rest upon the presumption of the interchangeability of human bodies. The plot of Collins’s novel details the process of this interchange of bodies rather than simply presuming such interchangeability, and as a consequence makes apparent some of the mid-century challenges attendant upon the effort to recognize, identify and control particular bodies through time, as they age, sicken, die.

Addressing his colleague Paul Fry who has recently published Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are, the author of the article places Fry’s book within the context of major issues in Wordsworth criticism and explains his difference from Fry’s ontic (atheologic and non-transcendental) emphasis.