Steele Alexandra Douris

Steele Alexandra Douris is an author, artist, and PhD candidate in the English department at Stanford University. Her dissertation, Second Selves: Women, Duplicity, and Detection in Victorian Popular Fiction, explores the mediated identity of duplicitous female characters – both criminals and detectives – in Victorian crime fiction and gothic novels. 

In recognition of her dissertation’s contribution to feminist and gender studies, she was awarded a 2021-2022 Graduate Dissertation Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Steele is also a member of the Stanford Literary Lab; in her work with the Lab, she initiated and led the digital humanities research project FanFiction: Generic Genesis and Evolution from 2017-2020. She has developed and taught her own courses in the Stanford English department, including WISE 5I: The Victorian Ghost Story and WISE 5V: Haunted Daughters: Race, Gender, and the Family in Gothic Fiction.  

As a visual artist, Steele works with both digital and traditional mediums, including watercolor, gouache, and digital painting in Photoshop and Procreate. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts + Justice Grant by the Stanford Arts Institute for the development and production of her zine, Unreliable Narrator. She is the author of Spirits, Seers, and Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic, and the Supernatural (Llewellyn, 2023), a nonfiction trade-published book that explores spiritualism, occultism, and folklore in the Victorian era. She is presently at work on a second nonfiction book project and a novel.