Project Team

Renée Fox is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, the Jordan-Stern Chair in Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, and Co-Director of the Dickens Project. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University in 2010 and was previously a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Miami. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) and co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies. Her published work in the fields of Victorian studies, Irish studies, and gothic studies has appeared in journals including Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and the New Hibernia Review, as well as in several edited collections and critical editions.

Dr. Lehmann received his Ph.D. in Classics from USC in 2018 and has since been teaching at Bard High School Early College-Cleveland, a public high school in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District that grants college credit from Bard College, NY. He has published on Dickens’s use of running headers, as well as racial bias in Dickens’s texts and their accompanying illustrations. He has also published a book chapter on how Hurston adapted parts of Vergil’s Aeneid in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Dr. Perera received his Ph.D. in literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2012; his dissertation focused on the idea of origins in the last completed novels of Charles Dickens. He has taught at Pacific Collegiate School, a public charter school in Santa Cruz, CA, for the past ten years, and is also a continuing lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, where he co-coordinates Oakes College’s core curriculum on race and social justice issues. He is the co-editor, with John O. Jordan, of Global Dickens and has published on how high school and higher education pedagogies can connect through new race- and social justice-conscious approaches to nineteenth-century literature. He has also helped the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz develop new outreach and support programs for high school teachers.

Rae Greiner is Associate Professor of English and editor of the journal Victorian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press), editor of the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Persuasion, and currently working on a book-in-progress entitled Stupidity After Enlightenment. She is a long-time faculty affiliate of the Dickens Project and is co-organizer of the 2024 Dickens Universe focused on Great Expectations.

Jacqueline Barrios is Assistant Professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. Dr. Barrios holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master’s degree in English from the University of California, Irvine, and Master’s in Education/BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley. A veteran educator at LAUSD, she served as a public school teacher for many years in South Los Angeles. She is a member and former teaching fellow of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative. Her interdisciplinary interests are expressed by embedding her scholarship within communities as founder of LitLabs, a public humanities project hub fusing visual performing arts and site-specific research with the study of literary texts, to document, animate and uplift the life-worlds of communities who interpret them. She is the author of the forthcoming book Dear Charles Dickens, Love South LA (University of Iowa Press).

John O. Jordan is a Research Professor and Professor Emeritus in the Literature department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published widely on Dickens and 19th-century English literature. He is the author of Supposing Bleak House (University of Virginia Press, 2011) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford UP, 2018). Together with Professor Renée Fox, he is Co-Director of the Dickens Project, an international scholarly consortium headquartered at UCSC. In that capacity, he has organized many scholarly conferences and served as Principal Investigator for several NEH summer institutes.