Amir Abahel is a doctoral student in the History Department. His research focuses on the history of economic life and capitalism in the early modern period, including how changes in pricing methods and practices relate to wider changes in the thinking and understanding of markets in society. Amir earned a BA and an MA from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. amirabahel2025@u.northwestern.edu
Alex Baines is a British citizen and doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Theatre and Drama. He received a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and an MA in Text and Performance from Birkbeck, University of London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His research focuses on performance practices at reconstructed heritage sites, particularly in contexts of Britain and empire. For the academic year 2024-2025, he is a short-term “Whose Democracy?” research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. alexbaines2025@u.northwestern.edu
Agam Balooni is a doctoral student in the English Department. His primary interest is the gothic—in particular, the relationship between crisis and productivity as the gothic intersects with the history of the market, fuses with realism in the nineteenth century, and expands into transnational and comparative dimensions. agambalooni2025@u.northwestern.edu
Julia Barr is a Ph.D. student in the History Department with a particular focus on modern Black British history. Her research interests include postwar immigration, Black British community life, and Black transnationalist politics and culture. JuliaBarr2028@u.northwestern.edu
Jennifer Comerford is a doctoral student in English studying eighteenth-century British literature. She is interested in how epistolarity dramatizes consciousness and identity construction. Her research interests include cross-channel exchange, agency, and consent. jennifercomerford2023@u.northwestern.edu
Samantha English is a doctoral candidate in the English Department studying Anglo-American literature. Her dissertation project troubles normative methods for reading female subjectivity by unraveling reproductive forms of the 19th century bildungsroman in contemporary literature and culture. Samantha holds a BA in English from Wellesley College. samanthaenglish2026@u.northwestern.edu
Ali Faraj is a doctoral student in Performance Studies with an MA and BA in English Literature and a BE in Computer Engineering from the American University, Beirut. He is studying elements of performance, class, and sexuality in post-WWII working-class culture in Britain, particularly in Kitchen Sink Drama and the Angry Young Men movement, but also in works by female playwrights and novelists such as Shelagh Delaney, Nell Dunn and Gillian Freeman. He is also interested in performances of race and class in northern England’s underground music and dance scene in the 1960s and ’70s. alifaraj2022@u.northwestern.edu
Maria Katsulos is a doctoral student in the History Department, studying 17th century English and Scottish gender, sex, and sexuality through art, literature, and theater studies. She received a B.A. in History and a B.A. in English from Southern Methodist University, where she was a President’s Scholar. mariakatsulos2027@u.northwestern.edu
Brian Leahy is a doctoral student in the department of Art History studying contemporary art. He focuses on the relationships among contemporary art, economics, and the state, particularly during the 1980s. A central interest is the history of Irish art, including issues of intra-European colonialism, transatlantic migration, racialization(s) of the Irish in the United States, and contemporary Irish economic policy. brianleahy2020@u.northwestern.edu
Madelyn Lugli studies the culture of foreign affairs in the twentieth century. She pays particular attention to the roles of gender and emotion in the creation of interwar-era international relations. You may find her published work in Modern American History, Public Books, and Tocqueville 21. madelyn.r.lugli@gmail.com
Christopher Montague is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Black Studies. Chris is a historian of Black political and intellectual history in the British colonial world. He is particularly interested in how Black thinkers and activists have envisioned and enacted new worlds in the afterlife of slavery. In his spare time, Chris likes to watch football (soccer), talk politics, and listen to the music of his younger years. christophermontague2023@u.northwestern.edu
Govind Narayan is a Ph.D. student in English whose interests include material culture in nineteenth-century literature and questions of circulation, exchange, and value. He is also interested in the social, cultural, and environmental implications of how we treat things, including practices of consumption and non-market methods of evaluation. Before coming to Northwestern, Govind worked as a musician in Mumbai. He completed his BA in English in 2018 from Ashoka University in New Delhi, where he also worked as a teaching fellow for a year. govindponnuchamy2025@u.northwestern.edu
Catherine Perez is a Ph.D. student in History studying 17th century English radical religion, popular politics, and print culture. Her research explores how antinomian and subordinated groups carved out a space for themselves in the contentious and fluctuating social, political, and religious spaces of mid-to-late 17th century England. She received her B.A. from the University of Florida and an M.A. in History from the University of Alabama. CatherinePerez2028@u.northwestern.edu
Elizabeth Winter is a doctoral student in the English department. She studies nineteenth-century British literature with a particular interest in representations of violence, fraught modes of female agency, empire, and textual circulation and adaptation. Elizabeth earned her BA in English, French and Political Science from Vanderbilt University. elizabethwinter2025@u.northwestern.edu
Olivia Lingyi Xu is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where she is completing dissertation, “Multilingualism of the Other: Writing the Novel in Translation East and West: 1818 – 1910.” This project argues for the centrality of translation as a formal component in the history of the novel by examining the formal intersection between translation practice and novel writing in nineteenth-century England and early twentieth-century China. Her research, which has been recognized with the “Expanding the Field” essay award from Northeastern Victorian Studies Association, has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals of Victorian Studies and Comparative Literature. lingyixu2023@u.northwestern.edu
ALUMNI
Claire Arnold, Ph.D in History (2023): The Demands of Distance: British Families and the World, 1830-1914 (Chair: Deborah Cohen). Current position: Modern British History Postdoctoral Fellow, Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University.
Shannon Blaha, Ph.D in History (2014). Mutual Interest: A Study of Cultural Cross-Border Cooperation in Ireland, 1938-1968 (Chair: B. Heyck).
Ryan Burns, Ph.D. in History (2019). Potential Protestants: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1780. (Chair: S. Sowerby). Current position: Assistant Professor of History at Jacksonville State University.
Will Cavert, Ph.D. in History (2011): Producing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Society in London, 1550-1750 (Chair: E. Shagan). Current position: Assistant Professor of History at St Thomas University in St Paul, Minnesota.
Teri Chettiar, Ph.D. in History (2013): The Psychiatric Family: Citizenship, Private Life, and Emotional Health in Welfare-State Britain, 1945-1979 (Chair: A. Owen). Current position: Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Zirwat Chowdhury, Ph.D. in Art History (Spring 2012): “Imperceptible Transitions”: The Anglo-Indianization of British Architecture, 1769-1822 (Chair: S. H. Clayson). Current position: Assistant Professor of Art History, 18th- and 19th-Century European Art, UCLA.
Clay Cogswell, Ph.D in English (2021): A Victorian Disposition: Emotional Susceptibility in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Chair: Chris Lane). Current position: Visiting Assistant Professor of English.
Ruby Ray Daily, Ph.D. in History (2021): Voluptuous Cruelty: Sex and Violence in Modern Britain (Chair: D. Cohen). Current position: Assistant Professor of Modern Britain and the British Empire, University of Arkansas.
Gil Engelstein, Ph.D. in History (2022): Queer Europe: Gay Liberation between Market and Movement (Chair: D. Cohen). Current position: Chabraja CCHS Public History Fellow, Northwestern University.
Anna Fenton-Hathaway, Ph.D. in English (Fall 2012): Novel Perspectives on Victorian Britain’s “Redundant” Women (Chair: C. Lane). Current position: Freelance editor and writer.
Laura Ferdinand, Ph.D in Interdisciplinary Ph.D in Theatre and Drama (2022): Ladies Made: Racialized Performances of Femininity in the Segregated South (Chair: Tracy Davis). Current position: Postdoctoral Scholar at the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, Northwestern University.
Menglu Gao, Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies and English (2021): The Lacquered Chinese Box: Opium, Addiction, and the Fantasy of Empire in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Chair: C. Lane). Current position: Assistant Professor of English, University of Denver.
Johana Godfrey, Ph.D in English (2023): Victorian Anachronists: Knowing the Past in the Nineteenth-century Novel (Chair: C. Lane). Current position: Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University.
Emma Goldsmith, Ph.D. in History (Fall 2017): In Trade: Wealthy Business Families in Glasgow and Liverpool, 1870-1930 (Chair: D. Cohen). Current position: Research & Development, Open Research Group, Springer Nature, UK.
Alícia Hernàndez Grande, Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (2022). Disarticulated Bodies: Catalan Nationalism and Cultural Reconstruction, 1975–2017 (Chair: Dassia N. Posner). Current position: Instructional Designer, Concordia University, Chicago.
Christie Harner, Ph.D. in English (Fall 2010): Character Science and Its Discontents: Victorian Literary Interventions into Debates about Phrenology and Physiognomy (Chair: C. Herbert). Current position: Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College.
Darcy Heuring, Ph.D. in History (2011): Health and the Politics of “Improvement” in British Colonial Jamaica, 1914-1945 (Chair: A. Owen). Current position: Director and Earl S. Johnson Instructor in the Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
Emily C. Hoyler, Ph.D. in Musicology (Spring 2016): Broadcasting Englishness: National Music in Interwar BBC Periodicals (Chair: L. Austern). Current Position: Associate Professor, Adjunct, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Maha Jafri, Ph.D. in English (Spring 2016): Between Us: Gossip, Sociability, and the Victorian Novel (Chair: C. Lane). Current position: Assistant Professor of English at Sewanee, the University of the South.
Lisa Kelly, Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama (Spring 2019): Constructing Celebrity: Strategies of 19th-Century British Actresses to Enhance Their Images and Social Status (Chair: T. Davis). Current position: Theatrical Operations Manager, Norwegian Cruise Line.
Hosanna Krienke, Ph.D. in English (Fall 2016): The Afterlife of Illness: Narratives and Practices of Convalescence in Victorian Britain (Chair: J. Law). Current position: Adjunct Professor, University of Wyoming.
Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson, Ph.D. in History (Spring 2016): Working-Class Raj: Renegotiating Class, Sexuality and Race, 1858-1914 (Chair: A. Owen). Current position: Assistant Professor of History, University of Mississippi.
Jason Lusthaus, Ph.D. in English (Spring 2016): Victorian Reincarnations: Jesus, Religion, and Doubt in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Chair: C. Lane). Current position: Senior Software Engineer at Zip Co.
Katya Maslakowski, Ph.D. in History (2022): Men of Violence: The Rise of British Counterinsurgency Expertise at the End of Empire, 1919-1998 (Chair: D. Cohen). Current position: Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern Mississippi.
Sarah Mason, Ph.D in English (2021): A Sociable Silence: Silence and Sympathy in the Victorian Novel (Chair: J. Law). Current position: Coach with Career Protocol.
Elizabeth Caitlin McCabe, Ph.D. in English (Spring 2013): How the Past Remains: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Victorian Anthropological Doctrine of Survivals (Chair: C. Herbert). Current position: Assistant Professor of Instruction, Chicago Field Studies, Northwestern University.
Nina Moon, Ph.D in English (2022): Mobile Women: Domesticity, Race, and Empire in the Eighteenth Century Transatlantic, 1666-1831 (Chair: Kelly Wisecup). Current position: Essay Coach.
Todd Nordgren, Ph.D in English (2018): Taking Form: Imagining Queer Life in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (C. Froula). Current position: Director of LGBTQ+ Programs and Services at Wellesley College.
Laurence Robbins, Ph.D. in History (Spring 2013): The Foundations of Education: Charity and the Educational Revolution in Tudor and Stuart England, 1560-1640 (Chair: E. Shagan).
Aileen Robinson, Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama (Summer 2016): Technological Wonder: The Theatrical Fashioning of Scientific Practice, 1780-1905 (Chair: T. Davis). Current position: Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University.
Sarah Roth, Ph.D. in English (Fall 2017): An Interesting Condition: Reproduction and the Un-Domestication of the Victorian Novel (Chair: J. Law). Current position: Upper School Director, Columbia Independent School.
Holly Swenson, Ph.D. in History (Spring 2024): Cultural Commerce: How Media Exports Made the British World in Australia, 1850—1990 (Chair: D. Cohen). Current position: Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern.
Tyler Talbott, Ph.D. candidate in English (Summer 2024): Plotting Ethnonationalism: Race and Novel Theories of the Nation Since the Victorians (Chair: R. Johnson). Current position: Assistant Professor in 20th/21st-century British Literature at Creighton University.
Chris Vickers, Ph.D. in History (Spring 2013): The Economics of Crime in Victorian England (Chair: J. Mokyr). Current position: Associate Professor of Economics, Auburn University.
Winter Jade Werner, Ph.D. in English (Spring 2014): The Gospel and the Globe: Missionary Enterprises and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1795-1860 (Chair. C. Herbert). Current position: Associate Professor of English, Wheaton College, Mass.