Ms. Katie Brandt, MA

Biographical Sketch: Katie Brandt (she/her) holds an MA in English literature from San Francisco State University (2017) and is currently a doctoral candidate (ABD) in critical English studies and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is also the Graduate Assistant Director of the UIC Writing Center and a professional English tutor at Malcolm X Community College Chicago. At UIC, she teaches classes in composition, literature of addiction, and tutoring pedagogy. Her work has been published in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, the Journal of Historical Fictions, and has been featured on both The Dickens Society Blog and The Dickens Project Audio Podcast. She was a Resident Graduate Scholar at the UIC Institute for the Humanities for 2024-2025 and is a HASTAC Scholar for 2025-2027. Her dissertation, Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, focuses on the construction of the addicted subject in the nineteenth-century novel and how the conventions and form of the Victorian novel are reliant on themes of addiction.