Colleen McDonell

Colleen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and the collaborative Book History and Print Culture program. In 2022-23, she was a Northrop Frye Doctoral Fellow at Victoria College. Her dissertation analyzes the representations of domestic servants in Victorian Gothic fiction. Supported by SSHRC and OGS awards, this work directs critical attention to how domestic space can function as the nexus between fear and fraught conceptions of class and labour. 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 discourse of genre and servitude in Victorian reviews of several Gothic novels. She has work forthcoming in Palgrave's New Directions to the Ghost Story (2025).

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.

List of Publications

“The Spectral Class: Female Servants and the Victorian Ghost Story.” The Palgrave Handbook to the Ghost Story, edited by Jen Baker, Henry Bartholomew, and Joan Passey (forthcoming 2024).