Muhamet Alijaj is a PhD student at the University of Exeter, whose thesis is entitled: ‘Accepting the Unknown to be Know and Be Known: Paranormal Non-Fiction’.
Francesca Bihet is a PhD candidate in folklore at the University of Chichester, based at the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. Her thesis Folklore and Fairies: the History of Fairies in the Folklore Society from 1878 to 1945 explores the changes in the treatment of fairies by Society members over this period and how far these reflect wider academic and folkloric trends. Previously, she has published a chapter on Channel Island fairies in Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD to the Present, as well as contributing her research to several magazine articles and blogs. She has a forthcoming chapter ‘Death and the Fairy: Hidden Gardens and the Haunting of Childhood’ in the MUP volume Uncanny Ecogothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Federico Boni is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Università degli Studi di Milano, where he is the Head of the degree program in Communication Studies. He has published widely on communication studies and cultural studies. Among his publications: The Watching Dead. I media dei morti viventi [The Media of the Living Dead] (Milano, Mimesis, 2016); American Horror Story. Una cartografia postmoderna del gotico americano [A Postmodern Cartography of American Gothic] (Milano, Mimesis, 2016); Sociologia dell’architettura [Sociology of Architecture] (with Fabio Poggi, Roma, Carocci, 2011); Sociologia della comunicazione interpersonale [Sociology of Interpersonal Communication] (Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2008) and Teorie dei Media [Media Theories] (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006). E-mail: [email protected]
Matthew Crofts was awarded his doctorate at the University of Hull, England, UK, for his research on the importance of tyranny to the Gothic mode, utilising a range of Gothic novels and historical eras. His previous publications include an article on MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman for Peer English (10, 2015), an article in the special ‘Alternative Dickens’ issue of Victoriographies (8:1, 2018), a chapter on Dracula’s multimedia legacy in the edited collection Gothic Afterlives (Lexington Books, 2019), and a joint-authored chapter on Gothic rats in the edited collection Gothic Animals (Palgrave, 2020).
David Devannyis a multi-media artist, writer and researcher. He has recently completed a PhD in Publishing Cultures at Falmouth University where he is Course Leader for English, Publishing and Creative Writing and a researcher in the Dark Economies research group. He is Assistant Editor (Technology) for Revenant Journal and this year co-organised the Folk Horror in the 21st Century conference. He has presented papers at a number of international peer-reviewed conferences including Haunted Landscapes, ELO (Bergen, Cork & Paris) and the British and Irish International Poetry Symposium. David’s print poetry has been published in a wide variety of magazines and in his debut pamphlet Wasps on the Way (Mews Press: 2012). His interactive piece ‘orange sweatshirt’ was shortlisted for The New Media Writing Prize and his multimedia poetry has been exhibited at The Phoenix, The Hatton Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, the Prado Media Lab and this year in galleries in North Cornwall and Toulouse.
Steven Hadley is an academic, researcher and consultant working internationally in the cultural sector. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland Galway, Visiting Lecturer at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Associate Consultant with The Audience Agency, and sits on the Editorial Boards of both Cultural Trends and the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy. His monograph, Audience Development and Cultural Policy, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Fay Hield is Senior Lecturer in Music at The University of Sheffield, teaching on ethnomusicology and music management programmes. Alongside research into the contemporary English folk scene she develops performances of traditional music, albums include Old Adam (2016) and Wrackline (2020). Hield also delivers outreach activity through Soundpost, a community music organisation she founded in 2011.
Siv Jansson teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Loughborough University’s London campus. She has published on crime fiction, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Frankenstein, and the Elizabeth Taylor film Cleopatra. Her current projects include ‘The Performance of Death’, the literature of anorexia, a study of Brontë biography and the writings of Elizabeth Rigby (Lady Eastlake). She was Literary Advisor on the BBC Brontë drama, ‘To Walk Invisible’ and has interdisciplinary interests in communication, disaster narratives and the media, celebrity studies, and writing studies, as well as literature.
K. A. Laity is an award-winning author, scholar, critic and tenured professor. Her recent publications include, ‘Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know’: The Celtic Fairy Realm in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The Celtic Obsession in Modern Fantasy, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Alistair Sims. London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming) and “The Unlikely Milliner & The Magician of Threadneedle-Street.” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 36.2 (2018). Visit KALaity.com for more.
Carolyne Larrington is Professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and teaches medieval English at St John’s College. She is the author of The Land of the Green Man (2015) and consultant for Hag (Virago, 2020).
Joseph P. Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. His recent publications include Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Penguin Book of Exorcisms (Penguin Classics, 2020).
Kevan Manwaring is a writer and academic whose practice-based research focuses on what John Clute termed “Fantastika” (science fiction, fantasy, the weird, and horror), and Climate Fiction. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Arts University Bournemouth. His articles have appeared in Writing in Practice, New Writing, Axon, and TEXT. His books include The Long Woman; Windsmith; The Well Under the Sea; The Burning Path; This Fearful Tempest; Oxfordshire Folk Tales; Northamptonshire Folk Tales; Desiring Dragons: creativity, imagination and the writer’s quest; Ballad Tales; and Silver Branch. His prize-winning novel, Black Box, was adapted into an audio drama by Alternative Stories and Fake Realities. He is a Fellow of Hawthornden, The Eccles Centre (British Library) and the Higher Education Academy. He blogs and tweets as the Bardic Academic.
Dr Kym Martindale until recently taught English, and Creative Writing at Falmouth University. She writes poetry, and is poetry editor for the journal Elementum: A Journal of Nature & Story; researches legacies of Romanticism in contemporary culture and literature; as a child, had an imaginary friend called Spooky Banana.
Sandra Mills is a PhD candidate based in the School of Arts at the University of Hull. Her thesis examines representations of the ‘living’ doll in contemporary horror literature and film. She co-organised the interdisciplinary ‘(Dis)Connected Forms: Narratives on the Fractured Self’ conference which took place at the University of Hull in September 2016. She has published on the work of Angela Carter, Carlo Collodi, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Coover. Her wider research interests include: children’s literature, Gothic studies, death studies, adaptation, intertextuality, contemporary science fiction and film.
Ben Nicholls is a singer, songwriter, double bass player and multi-instrumentalist whose work crosses many genres. He has performed and recorded in studios and stages across the world, from The Royal Albert Hall, Glastonbury Festival, RFH Meltdown to Womad New Zealand, jazz clubs in Singapore and universities in Libya. He’s a founding member of the band Kings of The South Seas, Dennis Hopper Choppers and Menlo Park, tours with the Seth Lakeman band, and is also known for his work with the Full English band. He was a co-writer on the Mercury Music Prize nominated Nadine Shah album Holiday Destination, and his work has been featured on many TV shows, films and adverts.
Sarah Price is a Research Associate in the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre at The University of Sheffield and author of Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts (Pitts & Price, 2021). She is currently working on a COVID response project, documenting the impact of the pandemic on arts and culture in Sheffield.
Becky Screeton is a photographer and illustrator from West Yorkshire. Her illustrations have appeared alongside poetry and prose in books such as Hinged (2011), The Pearl Works (2013) and Dead Man Walking (2018). Her photography has been published in research journals (e.g. Interfaces: Image, Texte, Language), anthologised in writing and art publications and smartphone apps, and exhibited at galleries in the South West (e.g. Terre Verte, Altarnun, 2019).
Carol Senf has studied the Gothic for 50 years and read comics even before that, but she is a newcomer to the systematic study of Gothic graphic novels. She has published on various nineteenth-century writers, including all three Brontë sisters, Sarah Grand, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, but she keeps returning to Bram Stoker and has written two books on Stoker and one book on Dracula, edited a collection of critical reviews of Stoker’s works, produced annotated editions of The Mystery of the Sea and Lady Athlyne, and written essays on various Stoker novels. She is currently working on three papers on Dracula, having discovered that age has not produced either wisdom or the ability to say “No.”
Adam Warne is a poet from Suffolk. His debut pamphlet Suffolk Bang was published by Gatehouse Press in 2018 and was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards. His poems have also appeared in magazines and journals such as The Rialto, Zarf, Blackbox Manifold and Wild Court. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and recently completed a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Roehampton. His PhD research focused on mental illness and Will Kemp’s “mad” morris dance from London to Norwich.