Biography
Beth Leonardo Silva’s dissertation focuses on the metaphor of the sibling-like bond in novels of the long nineteenth century, exploring how this metaphor challenges our understanding of Victorian family dynamics, desires and the genre of the novel. Observing novels that focus on extreme discord and harmony between legal and biological siblings, on the one hand, and on the pervasive coding of desirable suitors under a sibling metaphor, on the other, she is interested in the economic and emotional agency that sibling-like bonds enable and threaten. At stake are the assumptions that heteronormative marriages are the telos of the Victorian novel and that novels which end in heterosexual marriage inherently conform to a patriarchal agenda.
Research
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Novel, Representations of Family in the Novel, Nineteenth-Century Women’s Bodies and Empire
Selected Publications
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
“Between Siblings: Performing the Brother in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and No Name,” The Wilkie Collins Journal. (Forthcoming, Fall 2018)
“Rethinking the Familiar: Social Outsiders in Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Rebel of the Family and Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina.” Victorians Institute Journal. Vol. 44 (2016) 104-126.
White Paper
Kim Evelyn, Molly Hall, Beth Leonardo Silva, Kara Watts. “Humanities at Large: Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grant White Paper.” National Endowment for the Humanities. June 30, 2017.
Courses Taught
ENG 201: Literary Methods
ENG 368: The Bible as Literature
ENG 160: Literatures of the World, Teaching Assistant, 2 recitations
CSC 320, Social Issues in Computing, Teaching Assistant
ENG 160: Literatures of the World
ENG 110: Introduction to Literature
ENG 243: The Short Story
WRT 104: Writing to Inform and Explain