BWWC 2025 Organizing Committee
Jessica Berg
South Dakota State University
Jessica Berg, a high school English teacher with twenty years of experience, enjoys opening up rare worlds to her high school students and encourages twenty-first-century students to interact with voices from the past. Jessica recently earned her master’s degree in English at South Dakota State University and ended her graduate journey with a thesis focusing on how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novels counteracted the detrimental advice found in conduct literature. In addition to teaching English at Harrisburg High School, Jessica partners with two regional colleges. She is an adjunct professor at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she teaches English 200: The Literary Experience, and she is also an instructor at South Dakota State University, where she teaches Composition 101. In her free time (which is hard to find with four children and a dog), Jessica is an author and focuses her imagination on crafting contemporary romances and cozy mysteries.
Katherine Malone
South Dakota State University
Katherine Malone is Associate Professor in the School of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at South Dakota State University. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in nineteenth-century British literature, women’s and gender studies, and academic editing. Her research focuses on the dynamics of gender and genre in nineteenth-century periodicals and print culture. She has published essays on periodical genres, pedagogy, and Victorian women literary critics, including Margaret Oliphant, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Mary Augusta Ward, and Julia Wedgwood. Her recent work explores the uneasy relationship between periodicals and their constituent parts, including case studies of the Contemporary Review’s “Notes and Notices” column and the Leisure Hour’s women’s column. She is the Editor of Victorian Periodicals Review.
Lisa Ann Robertson
University of South Dakota
Lisa Ann Robertson is Associate Professor of nineteenth-century British literature in the English Department at the University of South Dakota. She teaches Honors English courses, graduate seminars, literature surveys, and courses on British Romanticism. Her research focuses on historical theories of the mind as they relate to a variety of topics and discourses, ranging from the imagination to education, scientific treatises to abolitionist texts. She focuses on the mind-body problem and how it was conceived, articulated, and “solved” during the Romantic and contemporary periods.
Taya Sazama
University of South Dakota
Taya Sazama is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Dakota studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature with an emphasis on marriage, courtship, education, and reader reception. In May 2020, Taya received the Emily Haddad Graduate Student Teaching Award from the University of South Dakota. Her review of Karen Bourrier’s Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019) appeared in the spring 2021 issue of Victorian Periodicals Review, and she has a forthcoming review with Review 19 for Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late (2021). In spring 2022, she co-organized a panel entitled “The Popularity of Feminist Storytelling” at NEMLA, where she also presented her joint research project “Feminist Storytelling and the Legacy of Jane Austen.”
Sharon Smith
South Dakota State University
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Sharon Smith is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the School of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at South Dakota State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition; literature, literary theory, and film; and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Her work focuses on literature of the long eighteenth century, particularly women's writing; the Gothic; and the Western. Her publications include essays on Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Barbauld, Anne Finch, and Aphra Behn. She is an editor for the journal The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.