Overview

Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom began in the summer of 2020 as a collaboration among four colleagues, and their vision has always been to maintain a collegial spirit as they reach out to other scholars and include them in the shared work. This page introduces the Directors and Advisors of the project and provides their biographies.

Director Biographies

Ryan D. Fong, PhD (Associate Professor of English, Kalamazoo College) teaches a wide variety of courses on literatures written in Britain and its colonies across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They also teach courses in Kalamazoo College’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Program, and have served as its director. Ryan is finishing his book manuscript currently titled Unsettling: Indigenous Literatures and the Work of Victorian Studies. He has published work from this project in Victorian Studies and Victorian Literature and Culture. As a faculty fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, they are also working on efforts to recruit and retain Indigenous students, incorporate Indigenous studies frameworks into the curriculum, and build more ethical relationships between the College and the local Potawatomi tribes of Southwest Michigan. Other UVC Role: Founding Developer. Pronouns: He/They. Image courtesy of Keith Mumma.

Sophia Hsu, PhD (Assistant Professor of English, Lehman College, CUNY) teaches a range of courses, covering such topics as nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, and the medical humanities. Her current book project focuses on the Victorian novel and its relation to histories and theories of the population. Research from this and other related projects has been published or is forthcoming in SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Review, and English Language Notes. At Lehman College, Sophia has been actively involved in promoting antiracist pedagogy through her work in the English department and the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Other UVC Role: Founding Developer. Pronouns: She/Her/Hers.

Cherrie Kwok, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia. She specializes in Global Anglophone Literatures from the nineteenth century to today, with a focus on race, imperialism, and an artistic style and political concept called decadence. In 2022, she received UVa's Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities for her teaching record and for establishing an antiracist pedagogy working group. She was the lead developer for “Undisciplining the Dramatic Monologue,” a lesson plan that was included in the first edition of UVC in 2021, and a lesson plan guide for the "Palestine in the 18th and 19th Centuries" lesson plan cluster. She has also published some of her pedagogical approaches in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), which focus on her early experiences teaching in undergraduate composition classrooms. Her research is published or forthcoming in Volupté: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. In addition to serving UVC as a Co-Director, she is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is the Founder of the Global Decadence Lab. Former UVC Role: Associate Editor. Pronouns: she/her.

Adrian S. Wisnicki, PhD (Professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln) teaches courses on Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Global Literatures in English, and Postcolonial Studies as well as Digital Humanities, Contemporary Technology and Culture, and Artificial Intelligence. His teaching and research explore how intercultural and interracial dynamics shape literary discourse in both the nineteenth century and present day. He particularly enjoys scholarship that involves international collaboration and that encourages teachers and students to stray outside their intellectual and cultural comfort zones. Among other activities, he is lead developer of One More Voice, director of Livingstone Online, and author of Fieldwork of Empire (2019). Other UVC Role: Founding Developer. Pronouns: He/Him/His.

Advisor Biographies

Pearl Chaozon Bauer, PhD (Upper School English Teacher, The Nueva School) currently teaches 9th and 12th graders at The Nueva School, and previously, she was Associate Professor of English at Notre Dame de Namur University.Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy, co-edited with Erik Gray (Columbia University), came out in 2024, and she's finishing up a book about how her research, teaching, and curriculum design are informed by indigenous knowledge philosophy. Other/Former UVC Roles: Founding Developer, Director. Pronouns: She/Her/Hers