Dr Jeanne Ellis
Senior Lecturer
MA & PhD (Stellenbosch)
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Tel: +2721 808 2227
TEACHING & RESEARCH AREAS
Nineteenth-Century Studies; Neo-Victorian Studies; Historical Fiction; Biofiction; Gothic Studies; Settler Colonialism; Gender Studies; Poetry
PUBLICATIONS
Articles
2025: “Short-Storying Neo-Victorian Contagion: The 1847 Typhus Epidemic in Andrea Barrett’s ‘Ship Fever’”, Neo-Victorian Studies, Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Contagion”, vol. 15, no. 2, 2025, pp. 169-201. https://neovictorianstudies.com/article/view/399.
2024: “A House Without Kindness”: The Haunted Mind as Haunted House Trope in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959)”, Scrutiny2, vol. 28, no. 3, 2024, pp. 132-145, (co-authored with Christan Botes, MA student). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/18125441.2024.2371861
2024: “Intimate Things, Remembrance, Elegiac Remnants.” Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics Slow Intimacy Special Issue, vol. 8., no. 1, 2024, article no. 10. https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Detail/intimate-things-remembrance-elegiac-remnants-14221
2023: “The Neo-Victorian Feminist Afterlife of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016)”. Brontë Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (2023), pp. 324-335. (co-authored with Julia Snyckers, MA student). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14748932.2023.2233009
2023: “An Embodied Feminist Poethics of Improper Speech in Atwood’s Alias Grace and Christiansë’s Unconfessed.” Gender Questions, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023, pp. 1-16. https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.25159/2412-8457/10349
2021: “Manly Pursuits: Rhodes, Queer Victorian Manliness and the Homosocial Politics of Settler Colonialism.” Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue on Gender and Settler Colonialism. vol. 11, no. 2, 2021, pp. 152-157, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2021.1881314. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2201473X.2021.1881314
Book Chapters
2020: “The Vivisectionist’s Tale: Auto/Biographical Voice and the Queer Fictions of Empire in Anne Harries’s Manly Pursuits”, in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects. Eds. Marie-Louise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben. Brill, 2020.
2012: “A Bodily Metaphorics of Unsettlement: Leora Farber’s Dis-Location / Re-Location as Neo-Victorian Gothic”, in Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century. Eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben. Rodopi, 2012.
2026: “Queer Elective Affinities and Empire: Cecil John Rhodes’s Homosocial Settler Colonial Politics and Edward Carpenter’s Anti-Imperial Sexual Radicalism” in Banerjee Sukanya and Fariha Shaikh (eds.), Routledge Companion to Global Victorian Literature and Culture, Routledge, 2026.
2026: “Cannibalising”, in Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Christian Gutleben (eds.), The Handbook for Neo-Victorian Studies, Brill/Rodopi, 2026.
2026: “Postcolonial Theory”, in Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Christian Gutleben (eds.), The Handbook for Neo-Victorian Studies, Brill/Rodopi, 2026.
Reviews
2013: “Gayle S. Rubin. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader.” Gender Questions, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 136-137, DOI: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC167607.
Creative Writing
2019: “Tableaux Vivants: Three Poems” in New Contrasts. Dryad Press.
2017: “Salvation” in The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology, Vol VII. Jacana.
Educational Material
2008: “Notes and Activities” for Schools’ Edition of Unity Dow’s Far and Beyon’. Maskew Miller Longman.
POSTGRADUATE SUPERVISION
Doctoral Dissertations
Current: Kambourakis, Stephanie. “Canines, Courtship, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel”
Current: Kansiime, Fortunate. “Poverty, Education and Female Embodiment in Ugandan Women’s Life Writing and Fiction”
Current: Troost, Josephine. “Victorian Educational Reform in Fiction, Life Writing and Theory: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Mason and Beatrix Potter”
2025: Shiyoka, Selma. “Precarity and Resilience: An Ecofeminist Reading of the African Child in Fiction by Contemporary Women Writers”
2024: Minter, Lobke. “Speculative Gothic Fiction and the Scar as Trauma Trope: Imagining Hope through Horror”
2023: De Villiers, Stephanie. “Contemporary Diasporas and the Writing of Madness and Gender in Fiction and Life Writing”.
2016: Laiser, Neema Eliphas. “Configuring Maasainess: Contested Textual Embodiments” (Joint Supervision with Prof. Grace Musila)
2014: Davids, Courtney. “From Chawton to Oakland: Configuring the Nineteenth-Century Domestic in the Writing of Catherine Hubback” (Joint Supervision with Dr Dawid de Villiers)
Master’s Theses
Current: Hart, Keelyn. “The Politics of Female Rage and Revenge: Feminist Revisions of Classic Myth in Contemporary Fiction”
2024: Snyckers, Julia. “The (Neo-)Victorian Madwoman: Biofictional Reconfigurations”
2023: Troost, Josephine. “Biofiction and Reconsiderations of Colonialism in Neo-Victorian Reworkings of Charles Dickens’s Novels”
2023: Botes, Christan. “’One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’: The Haunted Mind and the Haunted House in Gothic Fiction”
2018: Slabbert, Jani. “The Metaphorics of Erotic Pursuit and Violence in Classical Mythology and Its Transformations by Women Poets”
2018: Vorndran, Truchen. “The Afterlife of the Victorian Marriage Plot in Neo-Victorian Fiction”
2015: Louw, Bronwen Mairi. “Trauma, Healing, Mourning and Narrative Voice in the Epistolary Mode”
2015: Dabrowski, Stephanie Elisabeth. “Monstrous Losses and Broken Fairy Tales: The Significance of Fantasy as a Coping Mechanism for Loss and Trauma in Young Adult Fiction”
2015: Stander, Danie. “Reza de Wet’s Channelling of the Long Nineteenth Century on Post-1994 South African Stages”
2014: George, Carla Elizabeth. “Identity and the Children’s Literature of George MacDonald”
2006: Collins, Brenda. “Representations of Landscape and Gender in Lady Anne Barnard’s Journal of a Month’s Tour into the Interior of Africa” (MPhil Gender Studies)
2004: Diaho, Judith. “Experiences and Coping Strategies of Women Living with HIV/AIDS Diagnosis: A Case Study of Maseru, Lesotho” (MPhil Gender Studies)
2004: Murray, Jessica. “Intersections of Language, Landscape and the Violated Female Body in the Texts of Yvonne Vera” (MPhil Gender Studies)
Honours Long Research Essays
2026: Horn, Nina. “Female Autonomy and the Marriage Plot in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley”
2025: Eccles, Rebecca. “Queering and Queering Genre and Gender in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography”
2025: Goodyer, Layla. “Time-Travel, Patriarchal Norms, and Female Sexuality in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander”
2024: Beesley, Erica. “The Solitude of Immortality: An Investigation of Loneliness in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.”
2024: Harmse, Sumari. “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Recreation of Children’s Fiction in A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book.”
2023: Wolhuter, Kyra. “Love and Money Redux: Sally Rooney’s Normal People.”
2022: Snyckers, Julia. “My Armoury of Tiny Rebellions”: Female Agency and Interiority in The Woman Who Ran (2016), Sam Baker’s Neo-Victorian Revision of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)”.
2021: Troost, Josephine. “Shifting Conceptions of Victorian Masculinity and Social Conventions in North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë”
2021: Van den Berg, Nicole. Reconfiguring Dis/Ability through Children’s Fantasy Fiction: ADHD in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief”
2020: Bester, Nelia. “Sisterhood, Feminism and Rivalry in Recent Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Little Women”
2020: Botes, Christan. “‘Some People are Just Born with Tragedy in their Blood’: Gothic Doubling and Annihilation Anxiety in Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko”
2019: Oram, Caryn. “Emerging Feminism in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Jane Eyre”
2019: Sleet, Francesca. “The Oldest and Strongest Kind of Fear is Fear of the Unknown: Lovecraft’s Gothic Aesthetic”
2018: Joshi, Sharvari. “Of Masters, Manners and Men: The Novel of Manners in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Barton”
2018: Du Plessis, Marilé. “The Lesbian Erotic in Sarah Waters’ Neo-Victorian Fiction: Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet”
2017: Duval, Jessica. “Encountering Others: Xenophobia in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, The Final Passage and A Distant Shore”
2015: Slabbert, Janie. “Of Fathers and Fairy Tales, Mothers and Memories: Inflections of the Autobiographical Voice Through Fairy Tale and Nursery Rhyme in the Poetry of Ingrid Jonker and Anne Sexton”
2015: Viljoen, Christelle. “Fallen Women, Shame and Redemption in the Nineteenth-Century Novel”
2015: Vorndran, Truchen. “Undressing the Victorian Woman: The Figure of the Prostitute in Michel Faber’s Neo-Victorian Novel The Crimson Petal and the White”
2014: Stadler, Johanna Herbst. “Sex, Crimes and Misdemeanours: The Neo-Victorian Servant-Master Relationship in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace”
2013: Charles, Tembi. “Inscribed on the Imagination”: Contemporary Women Poets Writing the Aging Female Body”
2013: Dabrowski, Stephanie. “The Monstrous Act of Grieving: Narrating Parental Loss in Patrick Ness’s AMonster Calls”
2013: Louw, Nina. “Unsettling Natural History: A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia as a Darwinian Critique of Victorian Englishness”
2012: Roux, Lelanie. “Screening Jane Austen: Exploring Fidelity in Appropriating the Author as Character” (2012)
2012: Stander, Danie. “Prefacing and Portrayal: Portrayal of Interiority of Female Protagonists by Means of the Visual in Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady”
2011: Roodt, Jolette. “Victorian Interiors: Victorian Domestic Interiors and Female Interiority in Middlemarch and North and South”
2011: Van der Westhuizen, Rosamund Eliza. “The Medical Man and Embodiment in Frankenstein, Middlemarch and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”
2010: Hector, Nikita. “Flirting in the Minor Key: Jane Austen as a Contemporary Authority on Love and Flirting, and the Use of Flirting by the Secondary Characters in Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey”
2010: Olivier, Francois. “‘Ours is the New Age of Dorian Gray’: Late-Capitalist Culture Re-imagines Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray”
2010: Stindt, Anabel. “Keeping the Pink Lamps Lighted: Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Secret Garden”
2010: Taylor, Helen. “Procuring, Deploying and Representing the Emigrant Body: Tracing the Textual Trail of Female Irish Emigration to the Cape in the 1850s”