Speakers

Abigayle Claggett

Texas Christian University

Abigayle Claggett is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Texas Christian University, where she has taught composition and women’s writing courses. Her research focuses on nineteenth century transatlantic women’s writing, women’s literary networks, and Antiguan literary production, with an emphasis on recovery work.

Alammar Layla

English, Lancaster University

Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She is a third-year PhD student at Lancaster University, researching Arab women's fiction through the lens of literary trauma theory.

Athari Raha

English, Lancaster University

Raha Athari is a first-year PhD student in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Counsil NWCDTP. Her PhD thesis, entitled Alienated Memories: Reconstructing the Self in Autobiographical Writings of Diasporic Iranian Women, focuses on diasporic memoirs by Iranian women after the 1979 Revolution.

Carmichael-Davis James

English, Lancaster University

James Daviss is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Lancaster University. Using the post-critical mode to question the very act of literary criticism he attempts to see beyond the traditional understanding of modernist poetry and produce readings that are strange and, at some points, incomprehensibly personal, so better reflecting the literature of the modernist period.

Cat Conway

Goldsmiths, University of London

Cathleen Allyn Conway is a PhD creative writing research student at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose critical focus is on Sylvia Plath. She is a poet, journalist and lecturer, and her critical and creative work has appeared online, in anthologies, edited volumes, and print, including a piece on Plath for the Guardian. She has authored three poetry pamphlets, including All the Twists of the Tongue (Grey Book Press) which uses the Plath archive as a source text.

Crawford Bronte

English, Lancaster University

Bronte Crawford is a student on the MA in English Literary Studies at Lancaster University. She will be presenting a paper on the Pre-Raphaelite model, Fanny Eaton.

George Morgan

University of Texas at Dallas

George Morgan has a BA in Creative Writing from California State University Channel Islands and an MFA in Writing for the Performing Arts through the University of California Riverside's Palm Desert graduate writing program. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Texas at Dallas. George has written more than a dozen stage plays and musicals including Second To Die, Nevada Belle, and Thunder in the Valley.

Green Lottie

English, Lancaster University

Lottie Green is an undergraduate in English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She will be presenting a paper on the Cuban-American artist, Ana Mendieta.

Helice Koffler

Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum

Helice Koffler is an archivist and special collections librarian with extensive experience with performing arts archives and collections. She is currently working as a cataloguer for the National Endowment for the Humanities grant project “Research and Outreach: Increasing representation of Indigenous American, Hispanic American, Asian American and Pacific Islander artists in The Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library.”

Jill Fuller

Jill Fuller is a librarian and writer with a Bachelor of Arts in History from Winona State University and a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former genealogy librarian and archivist, she is currently the Marketing & Communications Librarian for a library system in southeast Wisconsin. Fuller is also the co-author and co-host of Let Genius Burn, a podcast exploring the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott.

Kiefer Holland

University of Edinburgh

Kiefer Holland is a fourth-year PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and the Secretary of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. His research, which is funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, examines the nineteenth-century writing, speeches, and storytelling of six African American women: Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Charlotte Forten, and Anna Julia Cooper.

Krista Quesenberry

Albion College

Krista Quesenberry is an Assistant Professor of English at Albion College in Albion, Michigan (USA). She studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century lifewriting. For more than ten years, Krista served as an editorial and research assistant to the Hemingway Letters Project, which is publishing with Cambridge University Press all of Ernest Hemingway’s known outgoing correspondence.

Lambert Michael

Sociology, Lancaster University

Michael Lambert is a Fellow in Social Inequalities in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He completed his PhD in history at Lancaster University on the social history of so-called ‘problem families’ in North West England during the ‘classic’ welfare state from 1945 to 1974. He has since worked at Liverpool Hope University and the University of Liverpool exploring histories of child protection and health policy.

Lauren Hehmeyer

Lauren Hehmeyer is retired from Texarkana College. She has published in the fields of library science, education, and literature and received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Heymeyer is the co-editor of the first academic book on May Alcott Nieriker, The Forgotten Alcott (Routledge, 2022). Her research on the Alcott family has appeared in American Studies Journal.

Louise Ashton

Lancaster University

Louise Ashton is a Doctoral Candidate in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She will be reading the opening of her historical novel, "Always Emily".

Lucy Rogers

University of Cambridge

Lucy Rogers is a first-year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge (Hughes Hall) and a member of the Faculty of English. Her research is funded by a Jebb Studentship and Sarah Squire Scholarship. Her doctoral project focuses on the first female ‘dons’ who taught and conducted research at the women’s colleges of the University of Cambridge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Maqbool Sameeya

English, Lancaster University

Sameeya Maqbool is a second-year AHRC-funded PhD candidate in English Literature at Lancaster University. She is exploring the obscure life of Edith Miriam Spray (1870 – 1956), the third or fourth Islamic wife of Abdullah Quilliam, who founded England’s first mosque in 1891. At the chronological centre of her research are very particular events; namely, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and the founding of England’s first purpose-built mosque in 1891.

Margot Lubiner

Margot Lubiner is an undergraduate student in English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She will be discussing her play on the life of Emilia Bassano: a seventeenth-century poet, musician, businesswoman and proto-feminist.

Mitchell-Sparke Sage

English, Lancaster University

Sage Mitchell-Sparke is an MA Student in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She will be presenting a paper on her historical novel of Ann Bonny: an iconic female pirate.

Nancy Kang

Nancy Kang is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba. She specialises in transnational, multi-ethnic, and diaspora women’s literatures. She will be presenting a paper on the WPA Witch Narratives of New Mexico.

Picher Galiana Paula

Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

Paula Picher Galiana is an undergraduate student in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She is in the process of publishing a collection of poems with a major Spanish publisher. She will present a paper on the forgotten female poets of the Las Sinsombrero Spanish literary movement.

Riya Das

Prairie View A&M University, Texas

Riya Das is Assistant Professor of English (British/World Literature) at Prairie View A&M University, a public Historically Black University in Prairie View, Texas. Das previously taught at Binghamton University, SUNY, where she completed her PhD. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature with an interest in gender, empire, and narrative form. Her research and teaching interests include gender, empire, Gothic fiction, science and literature, and nineteenth-century poetry.

Sophie Harrison

Lancaster University

Sophie Harrison is an undergraduate in English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She is presenting paper on a series of poems and vignettes inspired by the artwork of Sylvia Plath.

Susan Hoyle Bailey

Susan Bailey is the curator of the Louisa May Alcott is My Passion website, now in its 11th year. She is also the Administrator of the Facebook group, “Louisa May Alcott: A Group for Fans, Readers, & Scholars” sponsored by Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House and the Louisa May Alcott Society. She is the author of Louisa May Alcott: Illuminated by The Message (ACTA Publications) and a contributor to a Little Women anthology, Alcott’s Imaginary Heroes, published by Pink Umbrella Books, LLC.

Walker Jodie

English, Lancaster University

Jodie is a second year PhD student in English at Lancaster University. Her project focuses on four watershed moments in recent British history through the lens of an institutional silencing and an ‘organised forgetting’. Drawing on often unpublished or little-known testimonial poetry from these landmark events, her thesis argues that these works open up a different cultural space in which to push against a political obfuscation of events and reconstruct collective memory.