Steele Douris

Steele Alexandra Douris is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and a Graduate Dissertation Fellow at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Her dissertation “Second Selves: Duplicitous Identities in Victorian Fiction” examines the gendered mediation of identity in popular Victorian genre fiction, through the lens of concurrent developments in print culture, media, and early information technology. She is also a member of the Stanford Literary Lab; in her work with the Lab, she led a digital humanities project investigating the evolution of genre across a corpus of tens of thousands of digitally published “fanfiction” texts.

Steele is interested in the study of print culture and media from the 18th to the 21st century, with a particular focus on the print culture and media ecosystem of 19th century Britain.  She is also interested in forms and practices of serialization more broadly, including recent trends in the publication and serialization of fiction online; her work frequently engages with the intersection of gender, genre, technology, and print culture. In autumn 2021, Steele is teaching her English seminar “Science, Seances, Specters: The Victorian Ghost Story,” which situates the tremendous popularity of the Victorian ghost story in the context of contemporary developments in social science, pseudoscience, and forensic science.