Dr Ailise Bulfin

Email: ailise.bulfin@ucd.ie

Twitter: @AiliseBulfin

 

Dr Ailise Bulfin is a literary and cultural scholar whose research and teaching interests range from nineteenth-century to contemporary culture. Her work explores the dark side of the human imagination, with a particular focus on representations of war, environmental catastrophe and child sexual abuse. She has published a number of critical essays on topics such as xenophobia, invasion scares, sexual violence, natural catastrophe and climate change. Her monograph, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction, was published in 2018 and explores the interchange between popular literature and socio-political anxieties about war and invasion in the period before the First World War. She is co-organiser of the Invasion Network international research group and has worked with its members to produce two special issues of Critical Survey considering the impact of the work of the major invasion fiction author and conspiracist William Le Queux on early-twentieth century fears of war, invasion, spying and sabotage (in press for 2019 & 2020). Her current research entails a medical humanities strand exploring cultural representations of child sexual abuse in nineteenth-century and contemporary culture, and an environmental humanities strand focusing on contemporary representations of climate change and environmental disaster.

Dr Bulfin is a Teaching Fellow in Victorian and Modern Literature in the School of English, Drama, Film and Creative Writing at University College Dublin. She took her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, funded by an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship, and subsequently held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship there from 2014-16. In 2016-17 she was a Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. Her work has been funded by the Irish Research Council, Royal Irish Academy and the Trinity Wellcome Trust ISSF.

 

 

Dr Leanne Waters

 

Email: leanne.waters@ucd.ie

Twitter: @LeanneWaters

Dr Leanne Waters completed her PhD on late-Victorian religious bestsellers at University College Dublin in 2018. She is currently rewriting her doctoral thesis as a monograph under the working title of God in the Marketplace: Christianity, Melodrama, and the Late-Victorian Bestseller, in which she analyses the intersection of key cultural instances at the turn of the century, and the rise of the modern bestseller in Britain.

She has a chapter on literary representations of suffering Christly children in late nineteenth-century fiction that is forthcoming in The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Elizabeth Ludlow (Palgrave, 2019), and she is contributing an entry on bestselling English author Marie Corelli to The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, edited by Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Palgrave, 2019). She has also reviewed for the journal of Urban History (2017), and published guest blogs for The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates and for New Perspectives Postgraduate Symposium on the Humanities. She is on the editorial board of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, electronic publication that is dedicated to the study of Gothic and horror literature, film, new media, and television.