Catherine Waters taught for 25 years in Australia at the University of New England and the University of Sydney before moving to the University of Kent in 2009. Her research interests lie in Victorian literature and culture, with a particular focus on the writing of Dickens, the journalism of George A. Sala, and nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. She has written Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge University Press 1997; rpt 2005) and Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate 2008). The latter monograph was awarded the 2009 Robert Colby Prize by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. She has co-edited with Penny Gay and Judith Johnston Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008) and is currently co-editing Victorian Travellers and Italy with Michael Hollington and John O. Jordan for the same press. From 2001-2005 she was managing editor of the Australasian Victorian Studies Journal and she has written various journal articles, book chapters and reviews on Victorian topics. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Dickens Journals Online project (http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/djo/) and is involved in planning for various events associated with the forthcoming Dickens bicentenary celebrations in 2012. Her current research projects include an investigation of the writing of the Victorian ‘special correspondent’ – ‘Journalism on the move: the special correspondent and Victorian print culture’ – and her fellowship at the Beinecke Library will enable her to access the papers of George Augustus Sala, dubbed ‘the chief of travelled specials.’