Sydney Wildman

Biography

My research sits at the intersection of nineteenth-century natural history and British imperial culture, where I’m interested in how literary depictions of nonhuman agency can help us untangle the complexities of imperial ideologies. My dissertation specifically examines how representations of geological agency in the late-Victorian adventure novel function as a critique of imperial conquest and its destructive consequences. I am also one of the co-founders of UGSVA (Undergraduate and Graduate Student Victorian Association), which hosts annual online conferences that showcase the work of undergraduate and graduate students in Victorian studies across the world.

Research Interests

Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Natural History; New Materialism; British Imperialism; Anti- and De-colonial Perspectives.

Selected Publications

Author. “‘Dethroned by Fire’: Krakatoa’s Anti-Colonial Impact in R.M. Ballantyne’s The Island Queen (1885). Volcanic Materiality: Cultural Phenomena in the Age of the Anthropocene, ed. Dewey W. Hall, Edinburgh University Press. Forthcoming 2027.

Author. “Harriet’s Ecological Vampirism: Breaking the Binary Between Victorian Science and the Colonial Occult in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire.” Victorian Gothic and the Occult, ed. Kirstin A. Mills, Palgrave MacMillan. Forthcoming 2027.

Author. Covert Female Power Mediating Identity in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Footnotes: University of Guelph’s Undergraduate Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Social Chage, vol. 12, 2019, pp. 59-67.

Awards and Recognition

SSHRC Doctoral Award 
Queen’s Graduate Award 
R.S. McLaughlin Fellowship 
E.G. Bauman Fellowship

Graduate Supervision

Dr. Ronjaunee Chatterjee 
Dr. Brooke Cameron