KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Rachel Ablow, Sukanya Banerjee, Lydia Murdoch
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Rachel Ablow
Professor of English, University at Buffalo
Rachel Ablow specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture with research and teaching interests in the history and theory of the novel, the history of medicine, and the histories of epistemology, the sensations, and the emotions. She is the author of The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford UP, 2007) and Victorian Pain (Princeton UP, 2017), and the editor of a special issue of the journal Victorian Studies on “Victorian Feelings” (2008), a volume of essays entitled The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (Michigan, 2010), and a special issue of the journal Representations on “The Social Life of Pain” (June, 2019). She is currently incoming editor of The Norton Anthology, Vol. E: The Victorian Age and editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.
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Sukanya Banerjee
Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Sukanya Banerjee works on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain and its empire. More broadly, she is interested in postcolonial studies, ecology, studies of transnationalism and diaspora, political theory, and South Asia. Her book, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Duke UP, 2010), was awarded the NVSA Sonya Rudikoff Prize for best first book in Victorian studies. Banerjee is coeditor of New Routes in Diaspora Studies (Indiana UP, 2012) and a special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on “The Wide Nineteenth Century” (with Ryan Fong and Helena Michie). She is now coediting The Routledge Companion to Global Victorian Literature and Culture (with Fariha Shaikh). Her current book-manuscript, Loyalty and the Making of the Modern: A Transimperial System, argues for the centrality of loyalty to the formulation of modernity underpinning nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. She is also looking toward a future book-length project on Victorian ecocolonialisms.
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Lydia Murdoch
Professor of History, Vassar
Lydia Murdoch is a historian of modern Britain specializing in the history of childhood as well as a member of Vassar's multidisciplinary program in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. She is author of Daily Life of Victorian Women (Greenwood P, 2014) and Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (Rutgers UP, 2006). Her current book manuscript—What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Modern Britain—explores public mourning and political discourses surrounding the death of children in British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts over the long nineteenth century. She is also researching a future book on the use of children as medical subjects, particularly in the spread of the first smallpox vaccines.