Mason Patterson

Biography

Mason (Elise) Patterson is a Ph.D candidate in literature at Texas Christian University. Mason specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, domesticity, gender and queer studies, and her dissertation focuses on the nineteenth-century sensation genre’s use of ghosts and spectrality to address anxieties regarding modernization. She graduated with her undergraduate degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith in 2020. During her undergraduate career, Mason interned for the Periodical Poetry Index, under the supervision of Dr. Lindsy Lawrence, indexing and cataloging poetry featured in the nineteenth-century literary periodicals and served as president of her university’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Mason was the Addie Levy Research Associate and worked with Dr. Linda K. Hughes on various writing and research based projects. Mason became Vice President of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies (INCS) Graduate Student Caucus in 2024 and is currently serving as President for the 2025 calendar year.

Mason’s research on Oscar Wilde has been presented at Trinity College Dublin, and her co-authored article on collaborative pedagogy was published in Victorian Periodical Review. While at TCU, Mason has taught composition, introduction to poetry, and introduction to fiction. Her course Introduction to Poetry: From Shakespeare to Taylor Swift focused on bridging the gap between canonical poetry and contemporary music by using Swift’s lyrics as a tool to teach poetic analysis and introduce students to classical and contemporary poets. Her own poetry has been published in both TheFire Poetry Journal and The RavensPerch.