Professor Lesa Scholl PhD is Dean of Queen’s College, the University of Melbourne, and visiting professor in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. She received her PhD in Victorian Literature and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London, where she researched the role of translation in women’s writing. She has published extensively on women’s writing as well as hunger and poverty in Victorian Britain.
Dr. Emily Morris teaches Victorian and Romantic Literature, Women's Writing, and Introductory Literature courses at St. Thomas More College and the University of Saskatchewan. She is interested in gender, agency, and romance plots, and in intersections and tensions between fictional and lived realities. She has published articles on Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Yonge.
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.