The Gordon B. Hinckley Postdoctoral Fellows in British Studies
Get to know our 2025-2026 Fellows
Michelle Ripplinger
Michelle Ripplinger is the Gordon B. Hinckley Postdoctoral Fellow in Pre-1800 British Studies in the Department of English. She specializes in the literature and culture of late medieval England, with areas of focus including gender and sexuality, architecture and the built environment, empire, and the environmental humanities. Tentatively titled Empire’s Quagmires: From Swamp to Sewer in Middle English Literature, her first book shows how early English poets navigated the onset of the Little Ice Age and the consolidation of royal authority in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England by drawing on an unlikely imaginative resource: Roman propaganda about and literary responses to its storied sewer, the Cloaca Maxima. She has published essays on topics such as Chaucer and the ethical dimensions of performed authorial biography (“Chaucer’s Proleptic Palinode,” which received the New Chaucer Society’s Early Career Essay Prize in 2023); the fifteenth-century poet Thomas Hoccleve and the specter of the unanticipated woman reader; and Chaucer’s relationship to his Italian sources, particularly Boccaccio. Her recent work also explores the gendered implications of the “condescension of posterity” in twentieth-century critical histories of medieval literary studies.
Dr. Chelsea Reutcke
Dr. Chelsea Reutcke is the Gordon B. Hinckley Postdoctoral Fellow in British Studies in the Department of History. She teaches courses on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Britain and serves as the assistant editor for the Journal of British Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of religion, print culture, and politics in early modern Britain. Also drawing on legal, spatial, and memory studies, she investigates how clandestine book markets operated around censorship laws and the cross-confessional nature of Catholic print in the late seventeenth century. Her work highlights non-elite printers, booksellers, and publishers and brings new perspectives to contentious and overlooked figures including Queen Catherine of Braganza and James VII & II.
Former Hinckley Fellows
Dr. Sam Tett
Dr. Sam Tett is the Gordon B. Hinckley Postdoctoral Fellow in British Studies in the Department of English. Sam (she/they) specializes in long-nineteenth-century British literature and popular culture. Her areas of focus include gender and sexuality, the aesthetics of memory, the formation of modern romance, and the gothic, very broadly conceived. Among her other projects (see, e.g., her essay on deja vu’s long lost cousin, jamais vu, and her Collations Book Forum for V21), she is completing a book on Victorian memory titled Nostalgia’s Others: Paramnesia in Nineteenth-century British Literature and Culture, co-editing a Special Issue of Humanities titled “Queer Methodologies in Nineteenth-century Literature,” and embarking on a public-facing book project tentatively titled “The Romance Plot: Romantic Love and the Rise of Capitalist Individualism.”