Rachel M. Friars is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her current work centers on neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history, with secondary research interests in life writing, historical fiction, true crime, and the Gothic. Her work on lesbian historical fiction has been published with with Palgrave Macmillan, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Lexington Books, Crime Studies Journal, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and is forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.
Neo-Victorianism, Victorianism, Lesbian literature and history
Articles (Peer-reviewed)
[Forthcoming] “‘White snakes of sea-foam’: Coastal Space and the Lesbian Gothic in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines.” Coastal Gothic, edited by Emily Alder, Jimmy Packham, and Joan Passey. University of Wales Press, 2023.
[Forthcoming] “‘My heart is a hand reaching’: Lesbian Yearning and Queer Futurity in the neo- Victorian Novel.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal Special Issue: Re-Articulating ‘The Third Sex’: Victorian and neo-Victorian Engagements with LGBTQIA+, edited by Helena Esser, Mollie Clarke, Claire O’Callaghan. 2023.
[Forthcoming] “‘History digs a shallow grave’: Queer Temporality in Emily M. Danforth’s Lesbian Gothic.” Studies in the Novel, Spring 2023.
[Forthcoming] with Connor E.R. DeMerchant. “Neo-Victorian Queen Victoria.” The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorian Studies. Edited by Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
[Forthcoming]. “The Lesbian Neo-Victorian Novel.” The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorian Studies. Edited by Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
with Jesyka Traynor. “‘Dogged, Insightful, and Humane’: Writing Women’s Lives in Twenty-First-Century True Crime.” Crime Fiction Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2022, pp. 10–25.
“‘The curiosity with which that fist moves’: Lesbian Erotics in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, vol. 6, no. 3, 2021, pp. 217–232.
with Sarah E. Maier. “Mashing it Up: Recasting Power in the (Neo-)Victorian Penny Dreadful.” Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling. Edited by Natalie Neill. Lexington Books, 2021, pp. 55-72.
with Sarah E. Maier. “Stoically Sapphic: Gentlemanly Encryption and Disruptive Legibility in Adapting Anne Lister.” The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 125–152.
with Brenda Ayres. “‘We should go mad’: The Madwoman and her Nurse.” Neo-Victorian Madness: Revising Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature, Television, and Film. Edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 49–72.
In Progress:
[Under Contract] “‘You’re not the stuff of a chapter’: Queer Life and Women’s Activism in Biofictions by Emma Donoghue.” The neo-Victorian and the Late-Victorian, edited by Victoria Margree, Deborah Madden, and Aris Mousoutzanis. Routledge, 2024.
Creative Periodicals
The Lamp, vol. 13, no. 1, Queen’s University, 2023.
The Lamp, vol. 12, no. 1, Queen’s University, 2022.
Vox, vol. 16, no. 1, The University of New Brunswick, 2018.
Vox, vol. 15, no. 1, The University of New Brunswick, 2018.
Poetry and Short Fiction
“Chapter One: Shadows and Sentimentality.” The Lamp, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 11.
“Making Beds With Water.” The Lamp, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 66-72.
“August.” The Lamp, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 43.
“Marigolds and Honey.” A Peek in the Attic, vol. 1, no. 1, 2019, n.p.
“Chapter Three: Wounds.” The Lamp, vol. 9, no. 1, 2019, n.p.
“The Dark Between Trees.” The Lamp, vol. 9, no. 1, 2019, n.p.
“The Honey Gatherers.” The Lamp, vol. 9, no. 1, 2019, n.p.
“After Sonnet 29.” Distortion, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018, pp. 19.
“Pennywise & Patriarchy.” Distortion, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018, pp. 2-3.
“Single White Female.” Vox, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 36.
”1975.” Vox, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 24.
“The Holes Underneath.” Vox, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 46-49.
“Nine Hearts.” The Fog Lit Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 44-49.
“The Great Puzzle.” Vox, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 53-58.
“Accidental Clarity.” Vox, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 25-31.
“10 Things my Grandmother Taught Me.” Vox, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 62.
“The Red Haired Man.” The Fog Lit Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 45-51.
“Rural Affairs.” Vox vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 34-36.
“Marie.” Vox vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 28-31.
“The Third Man.” Vox, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 15-21.
Public Articles
“#AcademicTwitter: Research Communities and Pandemic Networking.” The Angle Newsletter. ACCUTE. Winter 2022
“‘Neither Racial Justice nor Socialism but a Messianic Parody of Both’: the Jonestown Massacre at Forty-Three.”PopMeC Research, 18 November 2021.
“‘Pull of this lady’s breeches’: The Case of Mary Newell.” The Journal of Victorian Culture Online, 6 August 2021.
Dissertation Title: An exclusively female ensemble: Neo-Victorian lesbian media and nineteenth-century queer narratives.
My doctoral dissertation will analyze the ways in which neo-Victorian lesbian media chronicles silences and misconceptions in the Victorian era regarding female homosexuality in literature and film from the last thirty years. I intend to explore the ambition behind creating art objects that place lesbian women in Victorian settings.
Current Positions:
2022/01 - Present Founder/President, Queer Studies Association of Canada
2020/10 - Present Co-Editor-in-Chief, The Lamp Literary Journal
2020/08 - Present Co-Editor-In-Chief, True Crime Index
2020/08 - Present Freelance Writer, The Lesbrary
Conferences:
05/2023 "'The flesh made word': Lesbian Neo-Victorian Pornography in Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads." ACCUTE.
05/2023 Panel Organizer/Panel Chair. “Life Writing as Queer Testimony.” ACCUTE & The Queer Studies
Association of Canada. York University.
02/2023 “‘Am I anywhere in there?’: Conflicting Archives in The World to Come.” Historical Fictions Research Network Conference, online.
11/2022 ““I will tell you my story”: Narrative Agency and Vampiric Autonomy in Young Adult Retellings of Carmilla.” Recovering the Vampire, online.
11/2022 “‘Someone else’s tragedy’: True Crime and Memoir in the Golden State Killer Trilogy.” Framing (Serial) Killing: Changing Narratives, online.
10/2022 “‘Induced by the demon’s lips’: Vampiric Orality and the Lesbian Mouth in Le Fanu’s Carmilla.”Northeast Popular & American Culture Association Conference, online.
05/2022 “A cruelty of nature”: American Landscape and the Lesbian Gothic.” ACCUTE.
05/2022 “‘Pulled into elsewhere, or perhaps nowhere’: Erotohistoriography and the Lesbian Gothic.” ACCUTE.
03/2022 “‘A real queer fish’: Erotic Consumption in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music.” Outsiders: Making Space at the Queer Intersections of Sex and Gender, University of Brighton.
02/2022 “‘I say you do not have a name’: Queering Dracula’s Brides in S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood.” Gothic Trajectories, online.
02/2022 “‘A kindling, a fascination, a yearning’: Female Friendship, Marriage, and Queer Communities in Biofictions by Emma Donoghue.” The Historical Fictions Research Network, online.
12/2021 “‘History digs a shallow grave’: Temporal Boundaries in the neo-Victorian Lesbian Gothic in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines.” Queer Temporalities Conference, University of Murcia, Spain.
09/2021 “‘You’re not the stuff of a chapter’: Queer Life and Women’s Activism in Biofictions by Emma Donoghue.” The Neo-Victorian and the Late-Victorian: Texts, Media, Politics, The University of Brighton, UK.
07/2021 Panel Organizer/Panel Chair. “‘Speaking of my oddity’: Inclusive Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Life Writing.” Victorian Popular Fiction Association Annual Conference.
05/ 2021 “‘The curiosity with which that fist moves”: Lesbian Vaginal Fisting in the Novels of Emma Donoghue and Sarah Waters.” ACCUTE.
04/2021 Moderator. “Class and Social Stratification.” Victorian Pasts, Presents, and Futures, 04/2021. Carroll University, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
04/2021 Moderator. “Aesthetic Elements: Art and Fashion.” Victorian Pasts, Presents, and Futures. Carroll University, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
043/2021 Panel Chair, Victorianism. Queen’s Undergraduate Conference in Literature. Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.
02/2021 “White snakes of sea-foam”: Coastal Boundaries and Lesbian Spectrality in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines.” Haunted Shores: Coastlands, Coastal Waters and the Littoral Gothic, online.
03/2019 “God fearing, drug hating, laudanum swilling Victorian England:” The Neo-Victorian Opium Eater in Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke.” The Age of Anxiety: Literary Studies in a Culture of Risk, Graduate Conference.
04/2018 “The Phantom Around the Corner: The Victorian ‘Other’ in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.” Arts Matters, UNB Fredericton.
03/2017 “Marie.” “Rural Affairs.” Atlantic Arts Undergraduate English Conference.
Invited Talks
02/2023 “The Lesbian Gothic Novel.” ENGL 451: The Nineteenth-Century Gothic, Queen’s University. (Renumerated Talk).
12/2022 “Traps, Trauma, and the Locked Door: Bluebeard in the 21st Century.” Romancing the Gothic, Public Talk, Online,12/2022.
05/2021 “‘I never knew that there were girls like her’: Locating the (neo)Victorian Lesbian.” Special Topics Presentation. Queen’s University Department of English Language and Literature.
04/2021 Keynote Speaker. “‘Like a lovely corpse’: The Zombic Fallen Woman in Victorian Art and Literature.” Keynote Address. Undergraduate Conference. Carroll University, Waukesha, Wisconsin.
