oti Bilkhu is a PhD candidate in the English department at York University. Her dissertation examines depictions of violence in Victorian children's adventure fiction between 1880-1914. She is specifically interested in the intersections of race, gender, class/caste, disability, and animal bodies as they pertain to British imperial ideology. From 2024-25, her Ph.D. research received the St. George's Society of Toronto Endowment Award. Her other interests include nineteenth-century illustration, neo-Victorian works, contemporary children's literature, and young adult (YA) graphic novels and comics.
She has several forthcoming publications, including an article about how crocodiles construct British nationality in Rudyard Kipling's "The Undertakers" (1894) in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature; a chapter examining how nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers used the Jack the Ripper murders to imagine social reform and its impossibility in the Routledge Handbook of Jack the Ripper; and a chapter under review exploring how fairy tales are used as alternative languages to speak of marginalized experiences in Trung Le Nguyen's The Magic Fish (2020). Her work has been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
She is also the secretary of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO) and co-organizes the annual VSAO conference. In 2024, she helped co-organize the Montréal hub of the NAVSA conference.
Feel free to reach her at: joti.bilkhu14@gmail.com
Created 6 August 2025