Michele Martinez was born in London, England, and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. She attended Stanford University for her Bachelor’s degree and then changed coasts for a doctorate at Yale. She teaches literature and writing courses at Boston University and Harvard. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British poetry, painting, and photography and the literary origins of modern art reception and curatorial practices. Michele has published her work in a variety of academic journals and book collections, including Victorian Review, Victorian Poetry, and Modern Language Studies. Her book Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: A Reading Guide sheds light on the verse-novel’s origins in classical epic and the English novel and illuminates the text’s portrayal of women’s work and sexuality, engagement with visual art, and passionate response to mid-nineteenth-century political and social change. Michele’s current work-in-progress focuses on sentimentality and the resistant subject in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, Sally Mann, and other photographers whose models were children, elders, or domestic workers from the artist’s own household.