Colleen McDonell

Colleen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and the collaborative Book History and Print Culture program and a Northrop Frye Doctoral Fellow at Victoria College. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation analyzes the representations of domestic servants in Victorian Gothic fiction. For her Book History and Print Culture practicum, Colleen examined the Spiritualist and servant-directed periodicals held at the British Library and the Bodleian Libraries, as well as analyzed the discourses of genre and servitude in Victorian reviews of several Gothic novels.

List of Publications

• “The Spectral Class: Female Servants and the Victorian Ghost Story.” New Directions in the Ghost Story, edited by Jen Baker, Henry Bartholomew, and Joan Passey. Palgrave, forthcoming 2025.

Additional Information

Outside of her research, Colleen has previously served as the Canadian Graduate Representative for North American Victorian Studies Association, as the co-organizer of NAVSA’s 2020-21 virtual professional development workshops, and as the co-convener for the Nineteenth Century Reading Group in the Department of English. Currently, she works as a writing consultant at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication.