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My dissertation examines the cross-class relations of Victorian women separated by social status but brought together by their faith in a subversive Christian God who supports female labour. Using original archival research, this project documents the untold story of working-class women and their middle-class allies who challenged patriarchal interpretations of Christian theology and, particularly, the limitations placed on women’s material lives. Drawing on Victorian social thought, feminist autobiography theory, and contemporary body theology, my project pursues two complementary objectives. The first aim is to bring the neglected voices of working-class women into the debates about gender, labour, and cross-class relations that defined the Victorian period. The second is to trace the origins of a feminist “theology from below,” which, born out of the material grittiness of everyday life in the nineteenth century, emphasized the incarnational nature of all bodies, including those labeled dirty, disabled, and perverse. My first two chapters respectively explore the diaries of two well-known Victorian women, Josephine Butler and Hannah Cullwick. Both reconfigure Christian discourses of mission and servitude, seeking not only agency within their positions of subjugation but also new models of relationality. The final two chapters bring together the voices of Jane Andrew (a farm worker) and Ruth Wills (a factory worker) with the writings of fin-de-siècle Christian socialists to construct a politics of redemption based on an ethics of inter-relation that, instead of positioning some bodies as “godly” and others as in need of “saving,” recognizes the immanent divine spirit animating all material life. Using contemporary feminist theology to strengthen the incarnational politics found in these Victorian writings, I argue in favour of bodily transgression—the willingness to walk, talk, touch, and labour in ways that are thought to be “perverse” and “ungodly”—as a legitimate answer to Christ’s call to defy social hierarchies, especially the ones established by capitalist modernity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The collection of Victorian-themed wearables and accessories of  "No Person Detected" serves as an innovative solution to the issues surrounding biometric technology and the invasion of privacy. This wearable technology was designed to counteract the involuntary recording of an individual's unique biometric data through the use of body cameras and CCTV, which can be accessed by law enforcement and marketing companies. The technology represents a democratization of design ideas and collaboration that allows individuals to create adversarial fashion and provides a level of biometric protection. This thesis explores the potential of technological innovation and collaboration to result in a more privacy-conscious society, one where individuals can take control of their personal data and protect themselves against the dangers of biometric tracking. The convergence of fashion, technology, and design has the potential to revolutionize how we approach privacy in a digital age, and "No Person Detected" represents an exciting step towards that future. / Master of Fine Arts / As technology becomes a larger component of our daily lives, our digital footprint continues to expand, leaving behind sensitive identifying information. From this data, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and ICE derive insights and conclusions about our lives. Due to unreliable data, facial recognition technology (FRT) has demonstrated implicit bias, particularly toward racialized bodies. This highlights the need for public education and responsible online behavior and raises questions about the privacy and security of personal data. At the intersection of fashion, history, and technology, "No Person Detected" aims to fight against the involuntary collection of biometric data in an adversarial way. With the proliferation of FRT and the accumulation of personal data from a variety of sources, it is crucial that both businesses and individuals establish transparent policies to protect user data. This thesis highlights both the historical context of racism in policing and the significance of privacy in the digital age.

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This dissertation explores how in the mid-nineteenth-century, the outline, an element in art, became a symbolic form for the relationship between the individual and society. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites either blurred or overstressed their outlines to highlight tensions in the ideal of the liberal individual. Writers like Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot responded with their own experiments in characterization and plot. In attending to the conceptual analogies between the outline of figures in art, the outline of literary character, and the outline of the individual in society, I explore the gradual decline of the cultural narrative of personal development and the waning of the belief in the ability to individuate in an ever-burgeoning society. Because of the ease with which the outline’s symbolic meaning traverses the boundaries of painting, literature, and lived experience, it fosters a verbal-visual vocabulary for experiencing sociality to which the visually literate Victorians were intuitively attuned. Chapter one surveys the debate about outline, tracing a line from Blake to Ruskin. Focusing on outlines in Turner’s Snow-Storm and Millais’s Isabella, I demonstrate painting’s ability to formally articulate social critique. The following chapters explore some ways in which texts experiment with outline: diffusion, evasion, and superimposition. For instance, in In Memoriam A.H.H., rather than regain a distinguishable selfhood after loss, Tennyson gradually blends his own self with the selves that surround him, in line with Turner’s aerial perspective. In Villette, Brontë draws on her experience as a failed artist and her reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters to fashion a uniquely feminine method of characterization, which I call negative space. She defines Lucy Snowe by filling in the space around her, leaving her to come out in relief. Finally, inspired by the photographic technique of double-exposure, Middlemarch develops characters by superimposing their identities upon one another, so that their outlines can no longer protect their illusion of singularity. Middlemarch shows how the most superficial social impulse of projecting our own preconceived notions onto our neighbors, can actually enrich rather than diminish their identities, and thus help to develop society as a whole. / 2027-03-31T00:00:00Z

The late nineteenth century British stage was hopelessly confused. It couldn’t decide whether it was London’s principle source of entertainment—mainstream and respectable enoughfor Queen Victoria herself to patronize—or the seedbed of all corruption and deviance in Victorian society. At the center of this split identity was the actress, a figure both well-beloved (in the case of stars like Ellen Terry) and the literal embodiment of everything a Victorian women shouldn’t be—loose, sexualized, and working (in the case of her contemporary, Olga Nethersole). Because of this liminal position, Victorian actresses thus create a fascinatingmicrocosm in which to study the implications of performativity and performance in late nineteenth century society. I argue that stars like Terry and Nethersole, though they did so by opposite means, deliberately performed multiple roles, both on stage and in society, in order to enjoy the autonomy they craved—one unavailable to the majority of Victorian women.The biographies of both actresses reveal compelling paradoxes. Terry, though respectedenough to be compared to the “ideal” Victorian woman (the proverbial “Angel in the House”), was in reality a fallen woman. Olga Nethersole, on the other hand, built her career on playing fallen woman roles, yet lived an upright and unremarkable private life. Despite these differences, however, both women rose to great heights of fame and earned careers, funds, and power overtheir lives and relationships that most women of the century would never dream of. This thesis investigates the anomaly of autonomous Victorian actresses through the lens of performance theory. Drawing upon the concepts of liminality and social performativity, introduced largely by performance studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Marvin Carlson, I work toward a practical connection between performance on the stage and performativity in society that remainslargely unexplored in the field of Victorian theatrical studies. Ultimately, I am shedding light onthe paradoxical, dual function of performance; as demonstrated in the lives of these two actresses, it has the potential to simultaneously reinforce societal norms and to protest against them.

The Penny Post (1851–1896), a religious working-class magazine, was published following a critical time for the Oxford Movement, a High Church movement in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement's ideas were leaving the academic atmosphere of Oxford and traveling throughout the local parishes, where the ideals of Tractarian teachings met the harsh realities of practice and the motivations and beliefs of the working-class parishioners. The upper-class paternalistic ideologies of the Oxford Movement were not reflected in the parishes, and the working-classes felt distanced from their place in religious worship. The Penny Post was published and written by Tractarian clergymen and followers to "triumph in the Working Man's Home," attempting to convince a working-class audience that the upper-class Tractarian clergymen and parishioners both understood and wanted to help the poorer peoples of society. However, an analysis of the Penny Post reveals that its creators had more complex motives and were targeting a more diverse audience than they claimed. Because of these complexities, the Penny Post's creators could not reconcile the discrepancies between working-class ideologies and upper-class ideologies; the Penny Post, in the end, undermined its own intended purposes. The elements of the magazine that attempted to address working-class concerns were overshadowed by other elements that, while appearing to address working-class concerns, directly targeted an upper-class audience. This dichotomy of purpose—simultaneously addressing different classes with different, often contradictory, beliefs—reveals the multifaceted nature of the Penny Post's efforts to reach their audiences. The Penny Post is a magazine that simultaneously addresses an upper-class audience and a working-class audience, a duality that creates ideological contradictions and tensions throughout the magazine. These tensions reflect the class issues within Victorian society and the ways religious movements dealt with those tensions in periodicals like the Penny Post. The Penny Post provides an important look into how the Oxford Movement, a movement not known for its understanding of and interest in the working classes, did attempt to reach and understand the working classes through periodical literature.

Victorian scholar William Knight remains one of the most prolific Wordsworth scholars of the nineteenth century. His many publications helped establish Wordsworth's positive Victorian reputation that twentieth and twenty-first century scholars inherited. My particular focus is how Knight's 1889 inclusion of "Home at Grasmere" in his Life of William Wordsworth, rather than in his chronological sequencing of the poems, establishes a way to read the poem as a biographical artifact for his late-Victorian audience. Knight's detailed account of the poet's life, often told through letters and journal accounts, provides more contexts-including Dorothy's journal entries and correspondence of the early 1800s-to understand the poem than MacMillan's 1888 stand-alone edition of the poem (whose pre-emptive publication caused a small debate in 1888-89). Knight presents "Home at Grasmere" as a document of Wordsworth's personal experience and development as grounded in the Lake District. Analyzing the ways Knight's editorial decisions-both for his biography as a whole and his placement of "Home at Grasmere" within it-shape the initial reception of "Home at Grasmere" allows me to enrich the conversation about Wordsworth and the Victorian Age. Currently scholarship connecting Knight and Wordsworth remains sparser than other areas of Wordsworth commentary. However, several scholars have explored the connections between the two, and I augment their arguments by showing how Knight's invention of the poem creates an essential part of the "Home at Grasmere" archive-a term Jacques Derrida uses to describe a place or idea that houses important artifacts and determines the power of the knowledge it preserves. I argue this by showing that Knight's editorial decisions embody the characteristics of an archon-keeper or preserver of archival material-as he creates the way to read the poem as a biographical artifact while also responding to Wordsworth's own beliefs about the poetry and biographical theory. Knight's archival contribution allows Victorians to view the poem as a product of Wordsworth's developing poetic genius and helps establish Wordsworth as the great Romantic poet.

In recent years, a number of efforts have been made to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic institutions, the workplace, and to examine and analyze representations of marginalized populations in a variety of literary and cultural contexts. These efforts usually acknowledge past mistakes, emphasizing the idea that history shall not and should not repeat itself. While analyzing the representations of disability is important in its own right, it's also important to understand why these perceptions exist. This thesis suggests that when the representations of disabilities from different mediums and from different time periods are examined in relationship, readers may gain a better understanding of society's perceptions not only of disability, but of people with disabilities. Among other issues, this thesis will note recurrent patterns in these treatments of disability, including whether there is any form of resistance to the predominant narrative about disability. Put in its simplest terms, the intent of this thesis is to consider the effect time and contemporary politics have had on people and on their beliefs about disabilities.