Notes on Contributors
Alison Bainbridge is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Northumbria. Her thesis is on the monstrous representations of neoliberal capitalism in the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. She has previously published work on Welcome to Night Vale as queer literature, and as an example of desert gothic.
Katie Barnett is a senior lecturer in Film Studies, and programme leader for Film and Media Studies, at the University of Chester. Her research focuses on representations of the family and gender in film and television, with a particular interest in images of fatherhood and siblinghood. She is the author of Fathers on Film: Paternity and Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood (Bloomsbury, 2020) and has published work on images of adolescence in popular culture, the star image of Robin Williams, and representations of boyhood and death.
Nina Barrett is a recent graduate from the University of Glasgow, obtaining a Master of Arts with first class honours in Film and Television Studies. Her research interests largely surround internet subcultures and new media, with her dissertation, “The Online Success of Shane Dawson: Identity, Optimisation and Engagement in the Professional Age of YouTube”, receiving top marks and high praise from her educational institution. You can contact Nina at [email protected]
Wendy Bevan-Mogg is Senior Lecturer in Fiction Filmmaking at the University of the West of England. Her research interests are in the process of fictionalisation for drama (with a particular emphasis on science stories), and her teaching specialisms include producing, distribution and women in early cinema. She began her career working for the distributors Artificial Eye and sales agent Pathé International, before moving into production.
Dr Laura Canning is an Irish academic, writer and filmmaker based in Cornwall where she is Course Leader of the BA (Hons) Film at Falmouth University. Her most recent published work includes contributions on the work of women producers to Women in the Irish Film Industry: Stories and Storytellers (ed. Susan Liddy) for Cork University Press (2020) and (as co-editor) European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Directions, Discourses and Genres (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).
Cord-Christian Casper studied German and English literature in Cambridge and Kiel. At CAU Kiel, he completed his PhD on Anarchism in Modernist literature, which was published with DeGruyter in 2020. After stints at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen and at JLU Gießen, he has recently joined the English Department at LMU Munich as a Research Associate. He is a co-founder and editor of Closure, the Kiel University E-Journal for Comics Studies. His research areas include Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, New Materialism, Anarchism, and Comics Studies.
Dr. Sharon Coleclough completed her PhD in Cinematic Performance at the University of Salford in 2014. A Senior Lecturer in Film Production and Sound Design at Staffordshire University, combining the theory and practice of moving image production; focussing upon the ways in which meaning is created through the technical application of craft. Recent/Future publications include – Endure Not Cure, Rammbock as mirror of the contagion narrative for Apparatus Journal Mar 2021, If We Could Just Talk to the Creature in an edited collection Zombie Theology to be published by MacFarland Press 2022 and Future Zombies – The Borg as Zombie edited collection Bloomsbury 2023. She also writes about the technology and aesthetics of film lighting – Being Seen – Viewfinder Magazine and sound – Rausch – Expressionismus Journal, DE. Sharon was recently interviewed by Screen International regarding her work on lighting for differing skintones. You can contact Sharon at [email protected]
Teresa Cutler-Broyles has an MA in Cultural Theory and an MA certification in Architectural Historical Preservation. She teaches film analysis and cultural theory classes at the University of New Mexico, including Cult Film, The Zombie Movie, Post-Apocalyptic Film, Architecture in Film and Introduction to Film Studies. She spends her summers teaching at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy focusing on the interplay of Italian history, identity, culture and food, with an occasional foray into the history of Italian gardens. Teresa writes both fiction and non-fiction. Recent academic publications include chapters on Star Trek, Forever Knight, Afghan Children in Film, American Tribal Style belly dance, performance theory, and more in edited volumes. She is executive editor of The Big Top on the Big Screen: Explorations of the Circus in Film (2020), and co-editor of Re-Imagining Spaces and Places (2022), and Kink and Everyday Life (2021). Recent reviews can be found in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Forthcoming publications include chapters on the series Doctor Who, the films Legend (1985), The Shining (1980) and Cat People (1942 and 1982), and on alien women in the Star Trek franchise. Her research interests include popular culture (specifically television and film), science fiction, vampires and other creatures of the night, monsters, circuses and other liminal spaces, performance, sexuality and gender studies, architecture, the history of garden design, and more.
Raechel Dumas (Ph.D. in Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder) specializes in contemporary Japanese and American popular culture, with emphasis on sexual difference in fiction, film, television, and video games. Dr. Dumas is author of The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, Extrapolation, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Science Fiction Studies, Supernatural Studies, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and South Atlantic Review. You can contact Raechel at [email protected]
Dr Helen Frisby obtained her PhD on Victorian funeral customs from the University of Leeds in 2009. Helen is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death & Society, University of Bath, Secretary of the Association for the Study of Death & Society (ASDS) and a Council Member of the Folklore Society. She continues to research, publish and speak on the history and folklore of death, dying and bereavement, including appearances on the History Channel and BBC Radio. Helen’s book Traditions of Death and Burial was published in 2019. Other recent research, with the University of Bristol, investigates the informal occupational culture of frontline cemetery staff. Helen is also Researcher Development Manager at UWE Bristol, with particular expertise in academic writing, qualitative research methods and postgraduate researcher wellbeing.
Madelon Hoedt is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of Narrative Design and Authorship in Bloodborne: An Analysis of the Horror Videogame (McFarland, 2019) and has published widely on (historical) examples of horror and the Gothic in popular culture, particularly in relation to performance and videogames. In her research, she is interested in issues of narrative, interactivity and experience, as well as links between horror and technology. She is currently working on a monograph on immersive horror performance.
Devaleena Kundu is an Assistant Professor at the School for Life, UPES, Dehradun, India.
Her academic engagements include issues pertaining to deathlessness, eschatology, gore and gothic horror, the psychology of serial killing amongst others. Her latest work, “Aesthetics of Corpses in Popular Culture” was published in the edited volume Death in Contemporary Popular Culture (2020), part of the Routledge series on ‘The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture’. You can contact Devaleena at [email protected]
Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction and culture, and he has published articles on the screen Gothic in Critical Survey and Gothic Studies.
Jane McBride is an amateur writer and cartoonist who makes webcomics, music and born-digital fiction under the pseudonym Eksie Kitchin. She has an MA in English from NUIG, with a thesis on liminal girls in urban and digital contexts. Her research interests include online culture, East Asian literature, urban design, electronic and experimental music, and sequential art. Her first album, I am a Ghost but Don’t Tell Anyone, was released with Girly Girl Musik in November 2019, and her second, Alice Onscreen, with No Thank You Recordings in December 2021.
Dr Bethan Michael-Fox, FRSA, SFHEA works as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, where she is also an Honorary Associate in the School of English and Creative Writing. Before shifting to a more flexible work role to raise a young family, Beth was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and English at the University of Bedfordshire. Beth is Assistant Editor for the academic journal Mortality, Social Media Manager for Revenant, and co-host of The Death Studies Podcast. She also holds a position as Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the study of Death and Society at the University of Bath. You can find out more about Bethan or contact her via her website at www.drbethanmichaelfox.com
Dan O’Carroll is an independent researcher. His research is practice-based and engages with ideas of heritage as ‘what matters’ from the past.
Benson Rajan is a PhD Scholar at Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He specialises in visual culture and media semiotics. His research on social media, gender studies, and human computer interaction studies has been published in various journals such as Journal of Communication Inquiry, Psychology of Popular Media, Palabra Clave, Tripodos, Punctum: International Journal of Semiotics, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Journal of Creative Communications, and Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research. E-mail: [email protected]
Brontë Schiltz recently graduated from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University with an MA in English Studies. Her work has appeared in the SFRA Review, Fantastika Journal, The Sibyl, Aeternum Journal and Vision, Contestation and Deception: Interrogating Gender and the Supernatural in Victorian Shorter Fiction, edited by Oindrila Ghosh, and she has work forthcoming in Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic, edited by Nicole Dittmer and Sophie Raine. She has also presented her research on two podcasts, Victorian Legacies and The Ghost Story Book Club, as well as with Romancing the Gothic.
Dr Merlin Seller completed her MA and Mst at St Andrews and Oxford respectively, obtaining her doctoral thesis at the University of East Anglia concerning intermedium works between film, photography and painting. With a background in Art History and Visual Studies, and five years’ teaching experience in game design she is currently Lecturer in Design and Screen Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, working across Film, Media and Game Studies. Her present research interests concern (Post)Phenomenology, Horror, and the Non-human. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @merlin_seller
Gareth Schott is a Professor in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Psychology but works primarily as a media and thanatology scholar. He recently served as a Guest Editor for a Special Edition of Mortality (Vol. 26, Issue 4). His forthcoming book Art of Dying: 21st Century depictions of death and dying examines creative responses and reflections on dying, death and loss across a range of mediums.
Dr Harriet Stilley is an early career researcher in modern and contemporary American literature. Since receiving her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, she has held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Harriet’s main areas of teaching and research expertise lie in late-20th and 21st-century American fiction, genre theory, critical race theory, and masculinity studies. She has published widely in these areas, with articles and chapters featuring and/or forthcoming in Teaching and Texts: Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom, the European Journal of American Studies, Journal of American Studies, Cormac McCarthy Journal, Gothic Nature Journal, HorrorHomeroom, Crime Fiction Studies, European Journal of American Culture, U.S. Studies Online, Edinburgh’s Companion to the Millennial Novel, and Oxford Bibliographies. She is the author of From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977 (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of the collection American True Crime in the Twenty-First Century Re-Examined: Critical Interventions in a National Obsession (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Harriet is the current Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Gothic Nature Journal and the Reviews Editor for the European Journal of American Culture.
Taryn Tavener-Smith is a Lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University. She holds a BA (Honours) in English Literature and Psychology as well as a Master’s degree in English Literature. Taryn’s other research interests extend to the Gothic genre with a particular focus on the monstrous-feminine, spectres, madness, and vampires in contemporary British fiction. She holds an affinity for the multidisciplinary application of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality. You can contact Taryn at [email protected]
Emily Jessica Turner is a journalist, independent scholar, and artist. She completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in the medical humanities, and her thesis looked at the creative work produced by mental health patients for ‘asylum’ magazines between 1844 and 1918. Her research interests are the long nineteenth century and Neo-Victorianism, and she writes on culture, society, and heritage. Her writing on horror includes Cinematic lycanthropy and monstrous femininity: a review of James Gracey’s The Company of Wolves for Gramarye (Summer, 2019) and A review of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful And Things Strange for Gramarye (Winter, 2018).
Ruben Vandenplas is a doctoral candidate at imec-SMIT-VUB and researcher at the Flemish Knowledge Centre on Culture and Media Participation. His doctoral thesis explores the everyday media practices of Flemish users in the current crossmedia landscape. His research delves into the concept of ‘media repertoires’ through both quantitative methods (including descriptive, cluster, and regression analysis) and qualitative (auto-)ethnographic methods.
Renske Visser is a Medical Anthropologist interested in Ageing, Dying and Death. She holds a PhD in Social and Policy Sciences from the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath and has done research on parental bereavement in young adulthood, homemaking in later life, ageing in secure environments, and cancer care in prison. Renske is the post-doctoral representative of the Association for the Study of Death and Society. She has a blog entitled Dead Good Reading, where she reviews books on death, dying and the dead, and is co-host of the Death Studies Podcast.
Dr Carina Westling is a media and cultural studies scholar. She specialises in the tensions and opportunities formed between the technical, social, and discursive aspects of multimedia environments and design for immersive, AR/VR and blended applications. She has research and professional experience in ethnographic and remote audience research in digital and physical media with live and online populations, and has developed a theoretical framework for interrogating the modelling of human participation and integration in distributed interactive systems across digital and physical materialities.
Emory Whaley is a third-year, international student at Falmouth University, studying English Literature. Before her undergraduate studies, Emory lived and worked in Michigan as a journalist, book editor, and union copywriter. Since moving to Cornwall and attending Falmouth University, she has dedicated much of her studies to exploring technology’s influence on literature, language, and narrative – taking a special interest in how fiction implements artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other interactive technologies.