Heather Braun received her Ph.D. in English from Boston College (2007), her M.A. from Claremont University (1999), and her B.A. from Lafayette College (1997). She joined the University of Akron faculty in 2013 and taught previously at Macon State College in Georgia. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, British Romanticism, the Gothic, the vampire tale, and YA literature. She has published on Victorian humor, David Mamet, Sydney Owenson, Mary E. Braddon, and minor Victorian poet, Mary E. Coleridge. Her book, The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale: From Gothic Ghosts to Victorian Vamps, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2012.