Steph Brown

Stephanie J. Brown

Steph Brown is Associate Professor of English, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the English Department, and affiliated faculty of Gender and Women's Studies. She is Vice-Chair of the university’s graduate interdisciplinary program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia.

Her book Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905-1924 (Toronto UP, 2024) maps the history of state surveillance of the British women’s suffrage movement and its leaders. It demonstrates how militant activists used various forms of writing – novels, short stories, journalism, and memoirs – to represent and resist state surveillance. These genres enable specific, strategic responses to the state’s repression of suffrage militancy. The book also explores the aftermath of suffrage surveillance by tracing the diverging activist careers of two prominent suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Allen, during and after World War I, as they continued their engagement with the state’s surveillance apparatuses. In doing so, Watching Women illuminates histories of the suffrage campaign through women’s experiences of navigating surveillance.

Dr. Brown is the editor of a scholarly edition of Edith Ayrton Zangwill's 1924 New Woman novel The Call, which appeared from Bloomsbury Academic's Modernist Archives series in 2019. She is currently acting as editor for a special issue of Surveillance & Society, the open-access journal of the Surveillance and Society Network, on the topic of “Literature and Surveillance.”

She regularly teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century Caribbean, British, and Irish literature, modernist literature, surveillance in the arts, and the rhetoric of historic and contemporary protest and mass cultural movements. 

She also runs the Literature and Culture in the UK program, which takes students to London for five weeks during the summer to study emerging literature and theatre.

Selected Other Publications:

“Resisting Racialized Surveillance in George Lamming’s The Emigrants.” Journal of West Indian Literature special issue on George Lamming, 2024.

 “Marseille Exposed: Under Surveillance in Claude McKay’s Romance in 
Marseilles.” Special issue, English Language Notes: Transhistoricizing Claude McKay, Gary Edward Holcomb and William J Maxwell, editors, 2021.

“Woolf’s Feminism” in the Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf, Anne Fernald, editor, 2021.

“Claude McKay, the Worker’s Dreadnought, and Collaborative Poetics.” 
Literature & History, 2019.

 “An ‘Insult to Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers’: The Woman’s Dreadnought’s Campaign against Surveillance on the Home Front, 1914-1915.” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 2017.

 “‘Too recent to be innocuous’: An Interwar View of Women’s Suffrage in Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2017.

 “Female Citizenship, Independence, and Consent in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016.

 “The Great Criminal, the Exception, and Bare Life in James Joyces’ Ulysses.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 2015.