JULIE SORGE WAY

Hi, I’m Julie. As of summer 2026, I’m now an assistant professor of English at Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia, where I teach classes in writing, literature, and critical thinking. In 2024, I completed my Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies and Technology and Media Studies at Old Dominion University. Prior to this, I taught literature, writing, and gender studies courses at James Madison University, where I was honored with their 2025 General Education Distinguished Teaching Award.

​My research focuses on open educational resources and open-access pedagogy, as well as the role of women in 19th and early 20th-century Britain, as narrated in woman-to-woman periodicals and domestic advice literature of the time. I also study the digital humanities, building and designing interactive digital editions, and ways to improve the online reader experience across different kinds of devices. I’m always at home in archives, both dusty and digital, and care most of all about how to make these ideas of history and literature matter for my students in the world today.

My 2024 dissertation, Inviting Submission, is available open-access through ODU Commons. Paired with its digital supplements, it was honored with the 2025 Sally Mitchell Dissertation Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. This work was significantly expanded with an RSVP Patrick Leary Field Development Grant in 2024 to become what is now the complete Open-Access Chronological and Topical Content Index to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852-1879). This simple interface facilitates users’ free access to the entire 27-year run of Britain’s first and most influential secular women’s magazine for the first time, indexing over 13,700 individual content items. The index was honored with the 2026 Emerging Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

Explore this site to learn more about my work and interests, or to reach out with collaboration inquiries.