Charlotte Bookham (she/her) is a Techne AHRC funded PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her project investigates how nineteenth-century circus animals traversed roles of pet, performer and property. More broadly, her research interests include interspecies interactions, performance history, circus studies, fairgrounds and material culture. She previously worked as a Learning Facilitator on the Golden Hinde and currently interns as Royal Holloway’s Curatorial Assistant. You may also find her making history videos on TikTok (@historian_char).

David is Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on C19 British history, including the books Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846-55 (Manchester UP, 2002); Palmerston: A Biography (Yale UP, 2010). His Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2019-22) has supported his work on a scholarly edition of The Diaries of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury to be published in 4 volumes in the British Academy Records of Social and Economic History series (published by Oxford University Press). David has also been editor of the Southampton Records Series since 2013.

Fabia (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, working at the intersection of the feminist philosophy of care ethics, critical disability studies and sacrifice studies to examine the fraught concept of (self-)sacrifice in mid-Victorian care communities. She is particularly interested in how Victorian texts negotiate the tension between (self-)sacrifice and self-interest and the kind of challenge this came to pose to the nineteenth-century imagination of care and ethics. Authors she works on include Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Her research interests more broadly include care ethics, medical humanities, feminism, affect studies, ecocriticism and the nineteenth-century realist novel.

Aude is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Southampton. Her current research interests include the relation between science and literature, and the representation of ‘the monstrous family' in Francophone literature. She is finishing a book based on her PhD, Fleurs monstrueuses: histoire d'une métamorphose, Littérature, femmes et botanique, describing the links between visual and textual representations of flowers, and the monstrous representation of women during the late nineteenth century. At the same time, she is working on the contemporary Lebanese-born Canadian playwright, painter and director Wajdi Mouawad and how he explores the family as a metaphor and origin of the Lebanese civil war.

Marion Tempest Grant (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Communications and Culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research explores British handicraft guilds, women’s work, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Her broader interests include art history, women’s history, digital humanities, visual culture, and the periodical press.

Johanna is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London (previously King's College London, the University of Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama) and has research interests in the Victorial novel, the fin de siècle, music and performance, fuel and extraction discourses, and gender, particularly female labour and its expressions in nineteenth-century fiction. She has co-authored several textbooks on poetry and Shakespeare aimed at GCSE and A-Level students through Peripeteia Press.

Ellie Hibbert is a History PhD student at the University of Essex, funded by a Chancellor’s Scholarship. Her thesis examines the experiences, emotions and embodiment of mothers and their midwives during pregnancy and childbirth in England in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This project has a particular focus on women’s writing and ego-documents, with the aim to uncover their own voices and examine their experiences alongside medical literature and practitioner casebooks. Ellie's broader research interests include medical humanities, women’s and LGBTQIA+ histories, and the role of archives, particularly uncovering archival silences, and the hidden histories of marginalised groups.

Pauline is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Cité (France). She holds a MA in Romantic and Victorian Literary Studies from Durham University. Her current doctoral research focuses on the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with a particular emphasis on the notions of event, efficacy, and potentiality. More broadly, she is interested in literary theory and politics, but also in British Romanticism and France. She has published articles in Postgraduate English and Romanticism on the Net.

Marcus Lawrence is a first-year PhD English student at the University of Nottingham, funded by the AHRC through the doctoral training partner, Midlands4Cities. Lawrence’s research examines the significance of apology and the apologetic in late-Victorian literature, focusing on interactions with literary style, queerness, and selfhood, exploring how Victorian writers developed distinctive styles that both express and shield regret. His research reframes the discourse around John Henry Newman, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James as productive attempts to cultivate a vocabulary of apology that affirms the possibilities of a queer self. His primary research interests are on the transmission of literary identity in the late-nineteenth century, having previously researched queer transmission in the verbal portraiture of Pater, Wilde, and Vernon Lee.

Scarlette-Electra LeBlanc is a PhD student at the University of Hull’s Leverhulme Trust Centre for Water Cultures. Her thesis explores the literary and cultural legacies of Holy wells and springs in Britain, examining the works of nineteenth-century folklore collectors and antiquarians alongside short fiction, poetry, and travel writing from authors including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and M. R. James. She holds a BA in English from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an MLitt in Romantic and Victorian Studies from the University of St Andrews. Her wider research interests related to the nineteenth century include fairy tale retellings, mermaid and changeling poetry, and fallen women narratives.Her work has been published in The Gaskell Journal.

Megha is a 3rd year doctoral scholar in the department of English, at Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, Delhi NCR, India, working on the areas of death and mourning in Victorian literature. She is also working as a Teaching/ Research Assistant. Her interests spread across a wide understanding of death as an event and the material and biological identity of the corpse as an evidence of finitude. Besides looking at fiction in general, Megha’s research also extends to the broader realm of Victorian nonfiction and 19th Century periodicals. Additionally, Megha takes a keen interest in poetry, especially multilingual poetry. She is also an active poet herself and is currently working on her collection, ‘Unseen.’

Jessica’s research interests include the connection between literary and psychodynamic discourse, transgressive female representations in the long nineteenth century and formalist approaches to poetry. Jessica is currently completing a PhD at Macquarie University on the relationship between Victorian dramatic monologues and nineteenth-century theories of the mind (associationism, monomania and Freudian personality theory). She contends that in nineteenth-century psychological poetry, the female psyche is not depicted chiefly as an interpreter of cultural inputs; rather, women’s ideas seem more contingent than men’s on navigation of the natural world. Thus, women’s “otherness” is mapped onto the environmental matrix that conditions their thoughts.

Dr Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies where she co-leads the project 'The Burns Supper at 225 Years: Scottish Tradition, Global Reinvention’. In 2025 she received her AHRC-funded PhD on the female-authored novel in Romantic Scotland from the University of Stirling (completed with co-supervision from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh). Her research interests include Scottish Romanticism, the history of the novel, theories of improvement, canonisation, and the interplay between Romantic and Victorian periodisations. She has published in The Burney Journal, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, the Burns Chronicle, Library and Information History, and The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and is the current Early Career Officer of the British Association for Romantic Studies.

Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the relationship between the professionalisation of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women illustrators and cartoonists and the emergence of the New Woman socio-political and cultural phenomenon in Britain. More broadly, her research interests include art and literature from the long nineteenth century, focusing on women artists and writers, gender and sexuality, print and exhibition culture, photography, and fashion. Her biographies of the illustrators Ethel Reed and Celia Anna Levetus for Yellow Nineties 2.0 were published in 2022 and 2024.

Fraser is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His research focusses on gender, sexuality and the body in Victorian and early twentieth-century literature. His monograph Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2022. Other recent work includes a chapter on Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson and queer pastoral soundscapes in The Victorian Idyll (Routledge, forthcoming) and a translation of Lee's essay on ‘Aristocratic Pastorals’ (Fanfulla della domenica, 1885) in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism. He is currently working on a project on touch and tactility in Victorian literature, which draws upon theories of neurodiversity to investigate the descriptive styles of sensory perception.

Benedict is Reader in Music at the University of Edinburgh. His teaching and research focuses on the music of the long nineteenth century. Rooted in detailed analytical engagement with music, his work nonetheless seeks to explore the intersection between technical analysis and wider questions of meaning (cultural, historical, and philosophical). Publications include The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era (Oxford, 2016), Music, Subjectivity, and Schumann (Cambridge, 2022), and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (2021). He is editor-in-chief of Music & Letters and general editor of Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series.

Sophie is completing her PhD thesis at the University of Kent, funded by a CHASE-AHRC studentship. Her research examines how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers conceptualised socialist education and parenting, imagining children as future socialist citizens. More broadly, her work explores fin-de-siècle theories of child development, children’s play and games, parenting, children’s spaces, and utopian thought. Sophie was Editor-in-Chief of Romance, Revolution and Reform from January 2025 to 2026, producing Issue 8 on ‘Play in the Long Nineteenth Century’.

Chelsea is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Sydney, researching the epistolary networks amongst women writers of the long-nineteenth century. Her writing has been published in Womankind, Cultivate, The Turl, Frontiers, and the Journal of Law and Medicine, and she was the 2021 recipient of the DL Chapman poetry prize for her collection ‘Apricity'. Chelsea is also completing a DPhil in Law at Oxford, applying an intersectional and relational human rights analysis to domestic abuse. As a chronically ill and late-identified Autistic person, she is an advocate for disability inclusion in academic spaces.

Amy is a researcher in nineteenth-century literature. She received her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, examining the influence of nineteenth-century scientific advances on the development of the Victorian realist novel, through the fiction of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. She is currently expanding the scope of this research to include the social novels of H.G. Wells. Her research interests are grounded within the long-nineteenth century and include the interplay between scientific thought and literary forms, and the tension between literary realism and romanticism. Other research interests include the scientific romance; eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century literary culture; depictions of space, place, and their relation to gender and class; representations of ‘Otherness’; literary forms (especially the Bildungsroman), and the New Woman. She is the current BAVS Newsletter Editor, formerly the Editor in Chief of FORUM, a winner of the Patrick Tolfree essay prize, and has held the Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London.