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:
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 current book project examines the figure of the stranger in Victorian literature and culture.
Joshua King is an Associate Professor of English at Baylor University and the current holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at the Armstrong Browning Library. He founded the 19th Century Research Seminar in fall 2010. Dr. King is author of Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (Ohio State 2015) and coeditor, with Winter Jade Werner, of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (Ohio State, May 2019). He has published numerous articles and essays on poetics, religion, print culture, and, more recently, 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, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many others. His new book project, The Body of Christ, the Body of the Earth: Poetry, Ecology, and Christology, shows how nineteenth-century British poets developed ecological visions by diversely reaffirming the participation of all creatures in God through Christ.
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.
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.
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.
Stewart Riley is a current PhD student at Baylor University. He received his masters degree from Baylor in the Summer of 2019, and beginning his doctoral work the following semester. Having graduated from Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute, he has been instilled with a love for many kinds of literature, but especially the traditions that inform and stem from English poetry, Platonic philosophy, and Russian novels. He currently writes on the poetry and theology of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and often thinks about the relationship between the sacred and the secular in western culture. He has also developed a passion for the baking of bread, roasting of coffee, and brewing of tea, which he especially loves when shared with friends on front porches and living room parlors.
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.
Anna Beaudry is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English with a focus on 19th century American Literature and the New England Regionalist movement. She earned her BA in English from Grove City College in 2014. She taught high school literature and rhetoric in Virginia before coming to Baylor to pursue her Master’s in American Literature. Anna completed her MA in 2020 and began her PhD that same year. She currently serves as Baylor’s Graduate Writing Center Coordinator and the Graduate School’s Doctoral Administrative Fellow, but she has also taught freshman writing and composition for the English department. Additionally, she is the President of the English Graduate Student Association.
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.