Dr. Leslie Simon (Chair, Philosophy and Humanities, Utah Valley University), discusses one of her current projects on possible connections between the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (1861) and a contemporary Victorian debate over the Indian practice of sati/suttee, self-immolation practiced by some Hindu widows through the nineteenth century (and even sometimes today). Last year Simon hosted The Dickens Society Symposium at UVU in Salt Lake City, Utah. Currently, she is working on a monograph exploring the thematic meaning of heaps in Dickens’s fiction.

She has published in “Dickens Quarterly,” “Dickens Studies Annual,” “Studies in the Novel,” and “Nineteenth-Century Contexts,” and is currently working on a book manuscript on the heap – as an image, an object, and a paradox – in the nineteenth-century imagination, entitled “Heaps: On Dickens and Modern Mathematics.”