Notes on contributors

Heidi Renée Aijala is the director of the writing centre at South Puget Sound Community College, Washington State. She was awarded her PhD at the University of Iowa, 2021, on ‘ “The Steam That Is to Work the Engines”: Women’s Writing and the Rise of Steam Power in Victorian Britain’. Her continuing research is deeply invested in issues of access, inclusion and social justice.

Kathleen Bell was formerly associate professor at De Montfort University, teaching English and creative writing. She initiated an undergraduate course on ‘The Working Class in Literature and Film’, leading her to seek out lesser-known working-class writers, including the pioneering Lancashire novelist and poet Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. She has published critical essays, fiction and poetry, most recently Disappearances.

Kirstie Blair is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. She has published extensively on Victorian poetry, and literary topics including religion, medicine, periodical history, working-class history and culture. Her Working Verse in Victorian Scotland (2019) was Saltire Society Scottish book of the year.

Florence S. Boos, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain: An Anthology (2008) and Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women: The Hard Way Up (2017). She also serves as general editor of the William Morris Archive, and her publications on Morris include History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris (2015), as well as editions of his Socialist Diary (2018) and William Morris on Socialism: Uncollected Essays (2023).

Adam Bridgen is a Leverhulme early career fellow at Durham University. His research explores the class dynamics of writing on transatlantic slavery, resource extraction, and human–animal relationships during the long eighteenth century. He has published widely on these topics, recently contributing chapters to Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (2022), Animal Theologians (2023), and Bluestockings and Landscape in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2025). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Antislavery before Abolition: Labouring-Class Writers and the Poetics of Empire, 1570–1788.

William J. Christmas is Professor of English at San Francisco State University, teaching eighteenth-century poetry, Jane Austen, and other topics. He co-edited with Kevin Binfield Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2018). A chapter on ‘The Verse Epistle and Laboring Class Literary Sociability from Duck to Burns’ was included in Goodridge and Keegan’s History of British Working Class Literature (2017), and he has written on Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley and Robert Bloomfield. He published The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (2001) and edited Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700–1740 (2003).

Luke Lewin Davies is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tromsø (Norway). He has previously taught English literature at the University of Tübingen (Germany) and at Keele University (UK). His monograph The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 was shortlisted for the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize in 2022.

Rebekah Erdman is a musicologist whose primary research explores the intersection of pastoralism, gender and nature in the music of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Great Britain. Her work on Rutland Boughton’s choral drama The Immortal Hour has been published in The Opera Journal and she has presented at conferences throughout the Midwest United States.

Steve Eszrenyi is a retired deputy headmaster but still works part-time at the University of Derby, where he supports students with dyslexia. He has recently started a PhD at the University of Liverpool on the comparison of English and West German miners’ novels, 1945–70.

Tim Fulford has written extensively on Romantic-era literature and culture. Among recent projects are a Routledge edition of Robert Southey’s Lives of the Uneducated Poets (2023) and a new edition of The Works of Henry Kirke White for Liverpool University Press (2024). His monograph on Experimentalism in William Wordsworth’s Later Poetry: Dialogues with the Dead, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. He is Professor of English at De Montfort University and runs the Robert Bloomfield and Henry Kirke White websites.

John Goodridge is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University, president of the John Clare Society, and a fellow of the English Association. He is the general editor of English Labouring Class Poets (2003 and 2006, six volumes), co-edited A Cambridge History of Working-Class Writing (2018) with Bridget Keegan, and edits and principally writes the online ‘Catalogue of Labouring-class Poetry’. Published books include John Clare and Community (2013), and a number of edited volumes of poetry and critical writing. Formerly Editorial Director of Trent Editions, he posts to academia.edu, Humanities Commons, and his WordPress and SoundCloud pages.

Livi Michael has written twenty books for adults, young adults and children, and one play. Her latest novel, Reservoir, was published by Salt in 2023. Her academic research concerns working-class fiction and most of her novels explore issues relating to women and class. Her short stories and articles have been published in Granta, The Irish Times, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. She has also taught creative writing at various universities and runs a podcast on short stories with the writer and translator Sonya Moor.

John Rignall is Reader Emeritus in the English department at the University of Warwick. His publications include Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992), George Eliot, European Novelist (2011) and, as editor, George Eliot and Europe (1997) and The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (2000). He also contributed to some of the collections edited by H. Gustav Klaus, among them The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982) and The Rise of Socialist Fiction 1880–1914 (1987).

Stephen Roberts (1958–2022), a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, was an associate professor at the Australian National University and an honorary fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, before his untimely death in July 2022. A major scholar of Chartism, he also wrote extensively on the history of Birmingham – James Whateley and the Survival of Chartism (2018) combines the two topics. His many key works include The People’s Charter (2004), An Annotated Bibliography of Chartism, 1995–2018 (2017) and Recollections of Victorian Birmingham (2018).

Matti Ron is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century working-class writing and its relationship to the avant-garde, having completed his PhD on the subject at the University of East Anglia in 2020. He has written numerous publications concerning questions of class politics and aesthetic form and received the Raymond Williams Society’s Simon Dentith Memorial Prize in 2018 for an essay on modernism and 1930s proletarian fiction. He currently teaches literature in adult education and is a producer on the Working-Class Literature podcast.

Ingrid von Rosenberg taught English literature and language and British cultural studies at the Free University, Berlin; at the universities of Braunschweig, Duisberg and Passau; and, finally, as Professor of British Studies at the Technical University of Dresden (1997–2004). Her main fields of research are working-class literature, women’s literature and gender studies, and postcolonial studies, especially Black and Asian British culture (literature, film, visual art). She has made several literary translations, including classical as well as contemporary literature.

Christian Schmitt-Kilb is professor of English literature at the University of Rostock. A former colleague of H. Gustav Klaus’s at Rostock, he wrote his official obituary on the university website.

Monika Seidl was formerly Professor of Cultural Studies at the English department of the University of Vienna, where she developed and established a cultural studies strand, which has become an integral part of the curriculum. She has published widely on popular culture and British cultural studies. Among her edited books are About Raymond Williams (2009, Roman Horak and Lawrence Grossberg, co-editors) and Silence Turned into Objects. W.H. Auden in Kirchstetten (2014, Ricarda Denzer, co-editor). She has also written a monograph on British writers and 1930s Vienna, and another on filmic adaptations of classics.

Simon J. White was a reader in English at Oxford Brookes University until January 2024. He is now semi-retired. He has published on labouring-class writing, Romantic-period literature, and witchcraft and magic in the literature of the long nineteenth century. Publications include Robert Bloomfield, Romanticism, and the Poetry of Community (2007), Romanticism and the Rural Community (2013) and, most recently, an essay on non-human animals in John Clare’s poetry for Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire (2022). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Magic and Place in Regional Fiction, 1818–1924 for Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic.

Sarah K. Whitfield is Reader in Musical Theatre at the Royal College of Music and Head of Doctoral Programmes. A music and theatre historian and practitioner, she uses digital humanities research methods alongside traditional archival research to challenge established narratives, focusing on uncovering the work that under-represented and minoritised figures do and have done in the arts. She most recently co-authored An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900–1950 with Sean Mayes (2021), and edited the collection Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity (2019).