Gender and Sexuality

Rachel Haines's research focuses on the nineteenth-century novel and considers questions of identity and identification relating to the construction of gender and sexuality. Her broad interests include queer theory, gender and women's studies, affect studies, the history and theory of the novel, and Henry James. Before coming to UVa, Rachel received her B.A. in English from Connecticut College, where she wrote an honors thesis on queer female desire in Henry James's novels titled "Queer Substitutions: On Relations Between Women in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove."

I am an international student from India, and before coming to UVA, I did my master's in liberal studies, with a concentration in English, at Ashoka University. I am interested in the everyday, the domestic, the boring and how our identities mediate our experiences and beings in these spaces. The approach I take to these questions, and to scholarship in general, is firmly interdisciplinary. At UVA, I have been a Democracy Initiative Graduate Seminar Fellow and have completed the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Certificate.

Katherine Churchill studies and teaches medieval literature. Her dissertation project, Archival Sensibilities: Posterity, Organization, and Collection in Late-Medieval England and France, traces how archivists changed how they stored and organized texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, transforming literary writing in the process. In addition to her work on media history and cultural memory, she also studies virginity, gender, orality, and nineteenth-century medievalism.

 

Natalie Rose Thompson is a PhD student who studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature; space, place, and recursive movement in British novels; feminist narrative theories; intertextuality and rewriting; and gender and sexuality theory. She is currently working on a dissertation tentatively entitled “Liminal Domesticity: Returning to the Threshold in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Natalie is originally from Austin, Texas, and loves Austin breakfast tacos and Austen juvenilia.