Amy Montz

Fulbright-University of Manchester Distinguished Scholar Award (Humanities)

A New Orleans native, Dr. Amy L. Montz is Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana where she teaches and researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures and material culture, young adult literatures, and Neo-Victorian literatures. Her Fulbright will take her to her favorite city in the UK, Manchester, to work at the University of Manchester researching local Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. She is an avid reader and writer, and is currently shopping her creative project, the novel A Hundred Storyvilles.

In her academic work, she is anticipating the publication of her monograph Dressing for England: Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels later this year with SUNY Press. As she looks ahead to her next project, she will combine her creative and academic writings into one monograph, Two Lived Lives: An Autobiographical Survey of Elizabeth Gaskell and Her Works, to explore how the concerns of the twenty-first century echo the same concerns of inequality of wealth, women’s rights, and industrialization that Gaskell wrote about in the 1850s and 1860s. She is looking forward to meeting the faculty and students at the University of Manchester and working with them to bring love of the Victorian era to contemporary England and America.