Kristen Starkowski

2019 Graduate Fellow

Kristen Starkowski

Kristen Starkowski is a Ph.D candidate in the English department, where she is finishing a dissertation called Doorstep Moments: Close Encounters with Minor Characters in the Victorian Novel. Her research interests include Victorian literature, minor characters, disability studies, penny dreadful novels, and the ethics of care. Her work has appeared in Latino Studies and in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. As a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities, she is working on a project that maps and quantifies the proportion of narrative attention afforded to minor characters in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son compared to their spinoffs, which were published in weekly parts in the Victorian penny press.