The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter: Human-Directed Evolution in Theodora Goss's Victorian Crossover Novel →

In chapter nine of The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Diana Hyde, daughter of the infamous Edward Hyde, asks the following question of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and her half-sister Mary Jekyll: “Is anyone not a member of this society?” The question, if posed playfully, could also characterize the novel itself—which manages to incorporate an impressively large number of nineteenth-century characters into a single cohesive plot.

Theodora Goss’s latest work, released in June 2017, paints a vivid and historically-rich portrait of London in the 1890s. In addition to constantly calling her reader’s attention to the era’s real political issues, like women’s suffrage, and defining events, like the Whitechapel Murders, Goss weaves together a rigorously detailed story that imagines scientific links and personal relationships between numerous characters from nineteenth-century works.

Click here to read the full article on The Victorianist!

FrankenLecture: "A Tale of Two Frankensteins"

When you read Frankenstein -- was it in high school? college? on your own? Did you use a Norton Critical edition of the book, or a Penguin Classic? 

If you can't remember what your book looked like, think back to the plot. Was Victor Frankenstein's love interest Elizabeth his cousin, or was she a problematically adopted orphan? Did Victor Frankenstein seem pretty level-headed, or did he whine incessantly about Destiny with a capital "D"? These questions can help you identify if you've read Mary Shelley's original 1818 text, or, her later edited and re-released edition in 1831.

Though the changes may not be as bad as George Lucas's 2000 additions to Star Wars, they are significant, and fascinating when put in conversation with Mary Shelley's biography and the larger literary culture surrounding her famous book. In this lecture for the UCR FrankenBlog, I tell all in "A Tale of Two Frankensteins."

Different houses built on the same foundation →

In this article for the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) postgraduate blog, I offer an academic review of the New York Times bestselling novel trilogy, Shades of Magic by V.E. Schwab. The series, which reached its thrilling conclusion with the final novel, A Conjuring of Light, on February 21, 2017, is set in four alternate-history parallel-universe versions of London in the year 1819. Using research in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, readings of works by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, and recent scholarship in Victorian studies, I argue that Schwab’s novel invokes the language of early experiments in electricity and magnetism to configure both biological and spiritual ideas of life and death.

And, for fans of the series, I also offer my academic take (as someone writing a dissertation that came out of Dracula) on the whole "Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards" debate. Enjoy!

Click here to read the full article on The Victorianist.

Going to Cambridge!

Exciting news! This May, I'm headed to the UK for the very first time, thanks to a Humanities Graduate Student Research grant from the interdisciplinary Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) at UCR. I'll fly from LA to London during the second week of May, 2017, where I'll spend a weekend in London, a week in Cambridge, hop over to NAVSA-Florence, and then return to Cambridge to refine my work for a few more days before catching a flight home. I can't wait to work with archival Darwin materials, and take my dissertation to the next level.

I plan to blog all about it, so check back here this summer and be sure to follow me on Twitter @mirandactl.

Whiny Victor Frankenstein

Have you ever noticed that Victor Frankenstein seems ... well ... a bit whiny? You're not alone. Whether you're in a book club, high school class, graduate school seminar, or special collections library, Victor Frankenstein's constant complaining makes it seem like he spends "90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else." [1]

My quick keyboard-shortcut search of Mary Shelley's 1818 text* yields the estimate that, within the novel, variations of the word "wretch" are used over 60 times, and variations of "miserable" or "misery" occur over 100 times. Often, these words are used to describe Victor himself, as he bemoans, and bemoans, and bemoans the misfortune of having accomplished exactly what he was trying to do.

Some viral social media posts have joked that this is because, contrary to popular film depictions, "Doctor" Frankenstein "WAS AN UNDERGRAD" [capitalization retained from original] who "...had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year." One Tumblr user comedically calls Victor a "19-year-old sin machine," and another suggests that to recontextualize how we might view Victor today, we should: "Imagine hearing about the dudebro living next to u [sic] in the dorms: 'yah Dave dropped out cuz he built a [...] person.'" [2]

"Yah, Dave dropped out cuz he built a person." In the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's novel, "19-year-old sin machine" Victor Frankenstein flees the scene of his monstrous act of creation.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley), 1831. Eaton Collection. From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside. 

Hilarious and valid as these arguments may be, which attribute Victor's moping to his age, immaturity, and hubris, Mary Shelley herself seems to have intended for Victor Frankenstein to be as overtly whiny as he is. In her introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, she explains her inspiration behind Victor and his Creature: 

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at the bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. [3]

True to her inspiration, Shelley's fiction brings this imaginary scene to life on the printed page, using intensely emotional language to craft the story's miserable tone and characterize the voice of our wretched Victor. The Creature haunts Victor's every sleeping and waking thought, as he always stands at his Creator's literal and metaphorical bedside, wide eyes "following" the guilty Victor, no matter how far he flees.

As a jokey, all-in-good-fun addition to the FrankenBlog, I have created the Twitter account @whinypantsfrank, which places images of the "whiniest" passages from Mary Shelley's original novel alongside humorous Tweets that use millennial punctuation and capitalization conventions to emphasize Victor's misery. Click here to follow Whiny Frankenstein!

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[1] This quotation comes from a viral Tumblr blog post, which can be viewed here.

*Note that this is a quick estimate rather than a thorough digital humanities project. I used an etext version of the novel available here via archive.org.

[2] See footnote 1. Some spelling and punctuation modified from original for clarity.

[3] Appendix G: Introduction. In Frankenstein: the Original 1818 Text. By Mary Shelley, edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), page 357. Bold print added for emphasis.

Book Review forthcoming in SFS

If you've been around a lot of Science Studies scholars lately, Donna Haraway's newest book, Staying with the Trouble, is a rightfully hot topic of conversation. But its large amount of new theoretical terminology, particularly its conspicuously long third chapter on "sympoiesis," can make it a bit of a time-commitment to read. Luckily, I spent virtually all of January digging my tentacles deep into the text, and weaving a thready web of all its arguments together into one concise book review. (Puns very much intended.)

Look for "Not that Cthulu," a review of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies, July 2017.

New Approaches to Darwin

Thanks so much to everyone who attended, and participated in, the Darwin panel that I organized for UCR's Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science (SFCS) Program this quarter. This event celebrated SFCS's recent name change, as we transition from the old acronym "Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies" (SFTS) to one that better describes the wide variety of research interests pursued across many different departments at the University of California, Riverside.

Speaking not only to our program's interests in Science Fiction, but also to our flourishing community of students and faculty who research alternative futurisms, especially as they relate to marginalized voices -- and the history of science, as understood by a wide variety of disciplines, this panel presentation (moderated by yours truly) brought together scholars from three completely different institutions: the University of California, Riverside; California State University, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California.

Patrick Sharp (Cal State, Los Angeles), Professor and Chair of Liberal Studies and co-editor of Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, presented his work on "Amazons and Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction," which included sf authors Mary E. Bradley Lane, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Leslie F. Stone. Dagmar van Engen (USC), a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, presented their research, "Animal Beauty, Aquatic Hermaphroditism, and Invertebrate Analogies in The Descent of Man." And Devin Griffiths (USC), Assistant Professor of English and author of The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins, presented "Plants with Pencils: Darwin and Collective Authorship,” an analysis of Darwin's On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects.

I look forward to further conversations with these generous scholars in the future!

Unique 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein at UCR's Eaton Collection

As I continue my co-curatorial work for the 200 Years of Frankenstein exhibit at the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Science Fiction Librarian JJ Jacobson and I have observed that our 1818 and 1831 copies are incredibly unique historical objects. Our 1818 Frankenstein (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones) contains personal annotations written in Pitman's shorthand, which a friend of the Eaton collection has translated, and I am continuing to study. I am in the process of further researching these annotations from the perspective of historical reading and writing practices, since I view shorthand writing as a media technology in its own right, that speaks to the larger history of literature and science. Although Pitman's method was released in 1837, the shorthand characters periodically underwent small changes as the manual was updated via new editions throughout the century. As I begin familiarizing myself with the Eaton Frankensteins for this project, I look forward to conducting comparative research, in search of methodological variations that may help us narrow down the date(s) when the shorthand was written. This kind of dating, in turn, will provide us insight into the material history of our specific copy of Shelley's novel.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones), 1818. Eaton Collection. From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside. 

Our 1818 Frankenstein, though it originated in London and now resides in Riverside, California, contains watermarks from the "Adelaide Circulating Library," suggesting that it also was held, for a time, in Australia. Since the Adelaide Circulating Library has a history spanning from 1860 to 1975, there is much to be discovered from tracing the material life of our book, as it has crossed continents and changed hands for the past 200 years.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley), 1831. Eaton Collection. From the holdings of Special Collections and University Archives, UCR Library, University of California, Riverside. 

Our 1831 edition (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley) is a similarly singular object, which has been "Frankensteined" in many ways. Of course, it describes itself as "revised, corrected, and illustrated with a new introduction, by the author." This reference to textual changes made both by William Godwin and Mary Shelley herself affirms D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf's assertion that "all modern editions of the 1831 are, to [a] slight extent, composite texts" [1]. But more than this, the Eaton's copy seems to have been cut up and re-bound. Sources suggest that the third edition Frankenstein was issued as number 9 in Bentley's Standard Novels series; in our edition, this portion of publication information has been cut out of one title page, and pasted into a new page in the re-bound book. Furthermore, I am currently researching some interesting disparities between our edition, and a digitized version of a similar 1831 book, made available by the University of Toronto via Archive.org.

Since there is still over a year of research to be done, the only thing I am sure of for now is that our collection is a treasure trove of Franken-history just waiting to be explored. Follow the UCR FrankenBlog, and check back for updates here, to see my vision of the exhibit as it grows, develops, and finally comes to life in 2018!

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[1] "Introduction." In Frankenstein: the Original 1818 Text. By Mary Shelley, edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), page 40.

Co-curating 200 Years of Frankenstein

After spending the summer as a Research Assistant for the Fanzine Project at UCR's Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Eaton librarian, JJ Jacobson, invited me to co-curate the Special Collections exhibit on 200 years of Frankenstein. This year-and-a-half long project will allow me to work with the rich collection of Frankenstein-related materials housed in the Eaton collection, including a first-edition 1818 Frankenstein in three volumes, and a fascinating copy of the third-edition 1831 Frankenstein.

Additionally, we are creating a FrankenBlog, which will trace the growth and development of our exhibit, while also celebrating other Franken-Related materials, events, research, and more. Click here to check it out!

2016 Night of Writing Dangerously

On November 20, 2016, I joined writers and teachers from around the world—as near as the Bay area, and as far as Qatar—for the 2016 Night of Writing Dangerously, a fundraiser for the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month. The event took place on the top floor of the Julia Morgan Ballroom in downtown San Francisco, with a noir costume theme.

Everyone brought their laptops to work on their novels-in-progress, and together, we participated in writing challenges, ate a catered dinner and NaNoWriMo cupcakes, enjoyed a candy, coffee, and tea buffet, and novel-themed cocktails. Throughout the course of the night, I wrote over 3,000 words of my newest science fiction novel, and made friends with many like-minded literary lovers.

More importantly, our write-a-thon raised money for National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writer’s Program, a nonprofit organization that encourages the teaching of creative writing in junior high and high schools, and provides educational materials for teachers interested in empowering their students with the creative freedom to imagine their own worlds.

Click here for more information about a nonprofit that has made a huge difference in my life for eight years and counting!

NAVSA: Phoenix and Florence

I had a phenomenal time at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference in Phoenix this year, where I presented my recent work: "Darwin among Phonologists: The Sociality of Shorthand and Evolutionary Biology." In my presentation, I used social correspondences between Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Erasmus Darwin, and the creators of both Pitman’s and Gurney’s shorthand writing systems, to argue that the concomitant development of phonetic writing systems and evolutionary biology—in conversation with one another—stemmed from the same necessity, in both fields, to find more precise ways of recording and remembering small details in order to understand a whole “language” system.

I am grateful for my colleagues' feedback and guidance, and honored to accept an invitation to present my research to the next NAVSA conference, the 2017 supernumerary in Florence, Italy this May. As my dissertation continues to develop, I look forward to bringing my latest work on "Darwin and Sound" to a series of specialty Darwin panels put together by George Levine.

She seems dead, but she's a vampire, right? →

In this article for the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) postgraduate blog, I position Carmilla the web series (2014-2016) as a feminist retelling of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 vampire story, which remediates Carmilla's character through millennial webculture. By saturating Carmilla the character with pop culture awareness, the series depicts the vampire as a centuries-old cultural repository, whose up-to-date-ness pushes her toward the side of good rather than evil. Similarly, because it takes place in an almost-real-yet-partly-science-fictional universe, explores a sophisticated relationship between Carmilla and Laura, and includes other characters with complex gender identities and sexualities, Carmilla the series reclaims the Victorian sensationalist story in order to envision a speculative queer utopia. 

Click here to read the full article on The Victorianist.