Julia Reid was educated at Oxford University, UK, where she received a BA in Modern History and a DPhil in English Literature. She has held Lectureships in British Cultural History and in English Literature, and is currently a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. This interdisciplinary background continues to inform her research interests, which centre on the interrelations of late-Victorian culture, science, and literature. Her first book, *Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle*, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006, and reissued in paperback in 2009. It examines Stevenson’s engagement with scientific thought in the late-Victorian period, arguing that creative writers and scientists were engaged in a common endeavour to understand the enduring heritage of ‘primitive’ life. Julia’s next project, *”She Who Must Be Obeyed”: Matriarchy in Victorian Anthropology and Fiction*, examines the debate about an imagined matriarchal past which traversed Victorian literary, scientific, and political discourses. She continues to be interested in the historical contexts of Stevenson’s work, and her Fellowship at the Beinecke Library will allow her to complete the textual work for an edition of Stevenson’s *The Amateur Emigrant*, his fascinating first-person narrative of transatlantic emigration and ‘slumming’.