Professor Emily Allen is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University, where her primary scholarly area is 19th-century British literature, particularly the novel. She also teaches in the comparative literature, women's studies, and theory and cultural studies programs. Professor Allen received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1986 and her master's degree, also with honors, as well as her doctoral degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990 and 1996. She held an Isaac Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University before arriving at Purdue in 1997. She has been an Associate Professor there since 2003 and Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program since 2008. Professor Allen has received numerous awards for her teaching at Perdue, including the Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award (English, 2001-2002), the university's highest honor. Her other teaching awards include the Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship Award (2002-2003) and more than a dozen departmental awards for teaching excellence. She has received several grants for teaching innovation, and she has been a fellow at Purdue's Center for Instructional Excellence. In 2002, she was voted into the Teaching Academy at Purdue University, and in 2008 her name was inscribed in the university's Book of Great Teachers. A booklover by nature and a literary historian by training, Professor Allen spends much of her time thinking about the cultural landscape of Victorian Britain. Her published work focuses mainly on pleasure-the private pleasures of reading and the more public pleasures of theatrical entertainment. She is the author of Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel and articles on 18th- and 19th-century topics, from the history of melodrama to the design of Victorian wedding cakes. Her next books will include Royal Wedding: Class, Crowds, and Nation in Victorian England, a cultural study of royal pageantry and excess, and Byron and the Constitution of the British Novel, an account of the influence of radical romantic poetry-and romantic poetry's most scandalous figure-on the development of the bourgeois Victorian novel, which she is writing with her colleague and husband, Professor Dino Franco Felluga. Professor Allen was a founding member and the first executive secretary of the North American Victorian Studies Association, which now draws members from all over the globe and is the largest group of Victorianists in the world. She lives in a Victorian house in Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband, their two small sons, two large cats, and a white rabbit.