Her research and teaching focus on Victorian literature and culture, interdisciplinary medical humanities, and letter writing practices in eighteenth-century literature and culture. She is the author of Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists (2010). Tabitha Sparks is an Associate Professor of English at McGill University, where she specializes in the nineteenth-century British novel, especially its popular and sensational varieties, Victorian cultural studies, and literature and medicine. She is the author of The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (2009), a collection of nineteenth-century criticism on the Brontes, and numerous articles and book chapters.