Mary-Catherine Harrison came to UDM in 2008, after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and her B.A. from Rutgers University. She specializes in Victorian literature and is particularly interested in how practices of reading shape subsequent ethical commitments. Her research combines formalist literary criticism with contemporary psychology and narrative theory to help illuminate the persuasive strategies of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. She is currently working on a book-length project titled The Ethics of Narrative Empathy: Cross-Class Relations in Victorian Social Problem Literature, in which she argues that narrative empathy, or imagining ourselves in the place of fictional characters, can have significant consequences for ethical beliefs and behaviors. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation awarded this project their Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for dissertations of significant ethical or religious value. Her article, “The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy: Reconceiving Dickens’ Realism” will appear in Narrative in autumn of 2008.