People

• 
• Robin Haas
• Doctoral Candidate
• At Rutgers Since: 2021
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• Primary Areas of Specialization: Early Modern & Restoration Drama; Shakespeare; Theatre & Performance; Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Queer & Trans Studies; Book History
• Field of Interest: Drama & Performance Studies, Early Modern, Gender & Sexuality, Restoration & Eighteenth Century, Seventeenth Century
• About:

  Robin Elizabeth Haas (she/they) is a PhD Candidate specializing in early modern and Restoration British drama and performance. Their recent research combines book history and queer and trans studies approaches to analyze the period’s printed plays, and investigates the ways that anti-trans and anti-queer violence is dramatically linked to spaces such as the convent, the closet and dressing room, the writing desk, and even the runaway carriage.

  Their dissertation project, titled "Trans Print & Performance in Early Modern British Theatre," examines the ways performance texts by Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Cavendish, Behn, and Congreve are represented and reproduced in print, especially in paratextual materials such as prefaces and dramatis personae, to illustrate how vital both the playhouse and the printshop are to our attempts to “do trans theatre history” in the early modern period. An article-length version of this project's first chapter, titled "The Tempest’s Trans Magic: Transition, Technology, & Futurity in Ariel Across Time," has been published in Comparative Drama (spring/summer 2026).

• Undergraduate Courses Taught:

  As Instructor of Record:

  Literature in Letters: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novels (Spring 2025)
  College Writing (2021-24, 2026-27)
  Expository Writing (2021-22)

  As Teaching Assistant:

  Principles of Literary Study (Spring 2024)

• 
• Laurena Tsudama
• Doctoral Candidate
• Tsudama_CV_Jan2025.pdf
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• Primary Areas of Specialization: The long nineteenth century, novel theory/history, realism, philosophy, aesthetics, empire, race/ethnicity, film/television.
• Field of Interest: Critical Race Studies, Film, Nineteenth-Century American, Postcolonial, Theory, Victorian
• About:

  Laurena Tsudama specializes in anglophone literature of the long nineteenth century, although her interests span the history of the novel more broadly. She has presented and published on topics ranging from British imperialism and the imagery of landscape improvement in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park to the appropriation of “Dickensian realism” in the HBO series The Wire to the workings of "counterfeit aesthetics" in nineteenth-century art criticism. 

  Laurena's dissertation, "Deceivers and Dupes: Relational Deception in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Fiction,” examines the strange relations constructed by lies and other forms of deception in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. The project responds to contemporary concerns regarding misinformation and falsification by relocating scrutiny from the present moment to an earlier one: the long nineteenth century. Seeing in the “age of doubt” a link to our current epistemic crisis, the project responds to this urgent problem by seeking to complicate our understanding of deception as more than the mere negation of truth. Through analysis of the lie as a relational act and an artistic practice, “Deceivers and Dupes” rethinks past and present accounts of lying as a linguistic, psychological, social, and aesthetic phenomenon while intervening in discourses surrounding the philosophy of truth and the psychology of belief to understand both the deceiver and the dupe as interpersonal and historical actors. 

  Laurena holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Texas at Dallas and an M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut. In addition to Rutgers, she has taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Quincy College, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the University of Connecticut. Laurena has also worked in primary and secondary education in the past, including several summers teaching for pre-college programs designed to support underserved high-school and middle-school students. 

• Undergraduate Courses Taught:

  ENG 358:383:B1, Readings in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, summer 2024. 
  ENG 355:101:RH, College Writing, spring 2024. 
  ENG 359:201:14, Principles of Literary Study, fall 2023. 
  ENG 355:101:01, Expository Writing I, fall 2021. 
  ENG 355:101:08, Expository Writing I, fall 2021. 
  ENG 355:101:V1, Expository Writing I, summer 2021. 
  ENG 355:101:DN, Expository Writing I, fall 2020. 

• Other Publications:

  Book Chapters
  “Dickensian Realism in The Wire.” Dickens After Dickens, edited by Emily Bell, White Rose University Press, 2020.

  “The Garden of Empire: Estate Improvement, British Imperialism, and Slavery in Mansfield Park.” Enchanted, Stereotyped, Civilized: Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film, edited by Sabine Planka and Feryal Cubukcu, Königshausen & Neumann, 2018.
  
  Digital Academic Publications
  “In the Age of the Counterfeit: Creative Reproductions in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism.” JHI Blog, 23 Aug. 2021, https://jhiblog.org/2021/08/23/in-the-age-of-the-counterfeit-creative-reproductions-in-nineteenth-century-art-criticism/.
  
  “‘He may just go to the Devil’: The Stormy Collaboration of Dickens and Cruikshank.” Dickens Society Blog, 13 Nov. 2017, http://dickenssociety.org/?p=1817.

  “Joshua Cohen’s PCKWCK.” Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations, 19 Oct. 2016, http://www.streakybacon.net/joshua-cohens-pckwck/.

• Education: M.A. Literatures in English, Rutgers University M.A. English, University of Connecticut B.A. Literary Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

• 
• Jorden Sanders
• Graduate Student
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• Field of Interest: African-American & Diaspora, Book and Media History, Early American, Nineteenth-Century American, Sound Studies

Jorden E. Sanders is a graduate student in the Literatures in English Ph.D. program. She has earned a B.A. in English from Westminster College of Fulton, Missouri (2014) and an M.A. in English from Georgetown University (2016). Her work deploys Black Feminist frameworks to explore how early African American listening and print cultures disrupt assumed relationships between the book, the body, and the body politic.

• 
• Lucina C Schwartz
• Graduate Student
• At Rutgers Since: 2021
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• Field of Interest: Gender & Sexuality, Global Anglophone, Victorian
• About:

  Lucina C. Schwartz is a second year PhD Student who studies nineteenth-century British literature and culture and co-organizes the Rutgers Nineteenth-Century Group. She is especially interested in how realist aesthetics developed through the novel and other forms like poetry and nonfiction prose. 

   

• Education: BA in English, Princeton University