Professor Phegley joined the UMKC English Department in 1999 as a specialist in transatlantic nineteenth-century literature. Her work focuses on Victorian authorship, readership, and publishing. She is particularly interested in women writers, the periodical marketplace, and sensation fiction. She is also fascinated by the connections between television series such as Showtime’s Penny Dreadful and Victorian serial fiction.
Dr. Phegley has written numerous books and articles including Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (The Ohio State University Press, 2004) and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Praeger, 2012). She has co-edited several essay collections, including Transatlantic Sensations (Ashgate Press, 2012). She is currently working on a book about the publishing partnerships of John Maxwell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sam and Isabella Beeton called Victorian Media Moguls: Marital Collaborations, Magazine Marketing, and the Invention of New Reading Audiences in Mid-Century England, for which she was awarded both the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Curran Fellowship (2013) and a Harry Ransom Research Center Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she won the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Humanities and Social Sciences Royall Professorship, the highest honor bestowed by the college.
Ph.D. in English, The Ohio State University
British Literature of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods; The Penny Dreadful and Victorian Popular Culture; Victorian Print Media in the Digital Age; Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the Origins of Detective Fiction; Transatlantic Sensations; Neo-Victorian Fiction