About

Diana Bellonby is a writer and scholar based in Philadelphia. She grew up in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C., studied English at Dartmouth College, and received her PhD in English and Women’s Studies from Vanderbilt University, where she specialized in nineteenth-century British literature and histories of gender and sexuality. Working with Ivy Schweitzer at Dartmouth and Carolyn Dever at Vanderbilt ignited her passion for feminist thought, social justice, and the power of culture to shape our daily lives.

From 2014 to 2024, she and her partner co-founded and directed The Fringe Foundation, a private nonprofit that awarded grants from $5,000 to $20,000 to grassroots, community-led social justice organizations around the United States. They partnered with groups committed to fighting intersecting forms of injustice, such as racial, economic, housing, and educational inequities, through community-based organizing. Grant recipients ranged from workers’ rights centers and anti-racism activists to summer youth programs and independent publishers. After a decade focused on non-profit work, raising two children, and moving her family across the country three times — from Nashville, TN, to Fargo, ND, to Florence, AL, to Philadelphia, PA — Bellonby returned to writing and building a literary community.

Her essays on gender, literary history, and life outside the academy have appeared in venues such as Criticism, The Microgenre, Public Books, New Rape Studies, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first book is a collection of essays co-edited with Nora Gilbert and Tara MacDonald, Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice (SUNY, 2026). She is at work on a feminist history of rape culture from Ovid’s Rome to Trump’s America, designed for a general audience.

@dbellonby / @dbellonby.bsky.social

Photo by Jonene Nelson, Owner of No Name Gallery

Please consider supporting the organizations funded by the Fringe Foundation over the years:

SOUTH

Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (Irondale, AL)

Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (Camden, AL)

Project Say Something (Florence, AL)

Workers’ Dignity (Nashville, TN)

Nashville Freedom Schools (Nashville, TN)

Mid-South Peace & Justice Center (Memphis, TN)

Miami Workers Center (Miami, FL)

Dream Defenders (FL chapters)