The 19th Century Research Seminar (19CRS) joins with Baylor University’s English department, the Armstrong Browning Library, and other academic departments of Baylor University provide an interdisciplinary forum for faculty and graduate students in and outside of Baylor to present original research in all areas of nineteenth-century studies. Every academic year 19CRS hosts a series of monthly lectures. Scholars of all disciplines are encouraged to present research that furthers our understanding of the 19th century.

See below for information about the 19CRS committee:

Faculty Committee Members

Kristen Pond Bio pic

Kristen Pond is an Associate Professor of English at Baylor University and the current coordinator of the 19th Century Research Seminar. Her research and teaching focus on the development of the novel, the rhetoric and ethics of sympathy, and gender studies. Her work appears in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Victorian Review. Her book Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830-1865 (Routledge, 2023) examines the figure of the stranger in Victorian literature and culture.

Photo of Tara Foley

Tara C. Foley is a Senior Lecturer in English at Baylor University. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature; specifically, her research interests include literature and urban planning, medical humanities, and literature of the American West.  Her work has appeared in The Howellsianand Enarratio: Exposition, Recounting, and Conversation. Her current book project analyzes the contributions of American writers to urban planning initiatives in major American cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Jennifer L. Hargrave is an Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University. She specializes in British Romanticism and its global entanglements. Her research also encompasses literature of the long eighteenth century as well as women’s and gender studies. Her current book project recovers the history of intellectual exchanges between the British and Chinese empires, showing how a literary examination of Anglo-Sino relations produces a new narrative of interimperial exchanges premised on intellectual curiosity as well as geopolitical gain. She has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.

Graduate Student Committee Members

Allison Scheidegger is a doctoral student and teacher of record in the English department. Before coming to Baylor, Allison earned her bachelor’s degree in literature with a classics minor from Patrick Henry College and spent two years teaching Latin and English to elementary and high school students. Allison is interested in Victorian translation theory and interactions with Greek and Latin literature and myth. Her work has been published in the Eudora Welty Review and her article on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Homeric scholarship is forthcoming from Victorian Poetry. 

Headshot of Kristyn Drew Woytkewicz

Kristyn Drew Woytkewicz is a third-year PhD student in the English Department at Baylor University. She received her BA in English from Mississippi College in 2019. Her primary research interests include 19th century British literature, particularly short fiction and women’s reform literature, as well as feminism and ecofeminism. She is especially interested in the life and work of Elizabeth Gaskell. 

Savannah Chorn is a PhD student in English at Baylor University, where she also earned her Master’s degree. Before coming to Waco, she graduated from Lee University with her BA. She is primarily interested in nineteenth-century British literature, religion, Victorian medievalism, and postsecularism, with an emphasis on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Photo of Kaitlyn Waynon against a backdrop of greenery.

Kaitlyn Waynen is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Baylor University. Her research interests broadly focus on 19th century female authorship, women’s experiences in imperial spaces, and how religion informed both real and imagined encounters with empire in Victorian Britain. She received her MA and BA from Texas Woman’s University with a major in history.

Reilly L. Fitzpatrick is a Teacher of Record and Ph.D. student at Baylor University. She has a Master’s degree in English from Azusa Pacific University and an MLitt in Romantic and Victorian Literature with a concentration in Women, Writing, and Gender from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She studied at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate where she was awarded the de Jager Prize for research and writing and recently received the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award here at Baylor. Her research interests include feminist, gender, and queer theory as well as education and social reform in the work of British women writers of the long nineteenth century.

Joseph Natili graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2019 and spent two years teaching at a great books high-school in Arizona before being accepted into Baylor’s political science graduate program in the fall of 2021. His primary research interests include 19th and 20th century political theory, with a specific focus on the German and Catholic political thought of those periods. Joseph’s secondary area of research is the Constitutional role of the Supreme Court in American politics. 

Honorary Members of Leadership Team

Josh King Bio

Joshua King is Professor of English at Baylor University, where he also directs the Environmental Humanities Minor. He founded the 19CRS in 2010 and serves as an honorary member of its leadership team.  He is author of Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (2015) and coeditor, with Winter Jade Werner, of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019).  He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on poetics, religion, print culture, and ecotheological and environmental perspectives in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keble, John Henry Newman, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others.