• Elliott Assistant Professor of English

    Morton Hall, 114
    (434) 223-6954
    mceleste@hsc.edu


Education

B.A., The Pennsylvania State University
M.A., Syracuse University
M.A. and Ph.D., Rice University
Graduate Certificate in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Rice University

Teaching and Research Interests

  • British literature of the long nineteenth century (ca. 1768-1914)
  • maritime fiction, oceanic historicism, and blue ecologies
  • network theory and new formalism
  • empire and postcolonialism
  • mobility studies
  • archival theory and material histories
  • first-year writing, especially style and peer review

Recent Publications

“Oceanic,” in “Keywords Redux,” ed. Rachel Ablow and Daniel Hack, special issue, Victorian Literature and Culture 51, 3 (Fall 2023): 467-470.

“Visualizing Mutuality: Teaching / Networks in Our Mutual Friend,” Victorians Institute Journal 49 (2022): 166-197.

Review of Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020), forthcoming in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies.

“The ‘bond of the sea’: Conrad, Coal, and Entropy,” in “The Green Issue,” ed. Brianna Beehler, Grace Franklin, and Devin Griffiths, special issue, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 42, 5 (2020 [published 2021]): 509-22.

“Peer Review, Revisited: Graduate Writing Groups,” in Making the Grade: Reimagining the Graduate Seminar Essay in Literary Studies, ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), pp. 99-113.

“Metonymic Chains: Shipwreck, Slavery, and Networks in Villette,” in “The Brontës and Critical Interventions in Victorian Studies,” ed. Lauren Hoffer and Elizabeth Meadows, special issue, Victorian Review 42, 2 (Fall 2016 [published Fall 2017]): 343-60.

“Dungeons & Dragons & Graduate School,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (6 Nov. 2017).

Selected Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

William W. Elliott professorship, 2024-present

Diversity Infusion Stipend, Center for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development, Berry College (2020-2021)

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship, Program in Writing and Communication, Rice University (2019-2020)

Diana Hobby Editorial Fellowship, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (2014-2019)

Graduate Teaching Award for Independent Instruction (inaugural recipient), Center for Teaching Excellence, Rice University (2018-2019)

Marilyn Marrs Gillet International Travel Fellowship, Humanities Research Center, Rice University (2017)