ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ISSUE 6 - July 2009
David Annwn is the author of Marion Evans Magic Picture Show, Middlemarch and Diorama (2001), ‘Returning to Fear, New Discoveries in Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria’ (2008). He is a member of the International Gothic Society and the Magic Lantern Society. Amongst his books on Irish literature are Inhabited Voices, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and George Mackay Brown (1984) and Arcs Through. The Poetry of Randolph Healy, Billy Mills & Maurice Scully (2001). A recipient of a Ferguson Centre award for African and Asian Studies, he has worked for Leeds University and the Open University in Leeds, Manchester and Dublin. Seamus Heaney has written of his critical essays that they are ‘wonderfully sensitive’.
Cindy McMann is a recent graduate from the University of Calgary, where she worked on a dissertation entitled “Feminist Spirituality in the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance Movements.” She teaches twentieth-century American Literature at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Her current projects include a study of the place of Helen Adam’s poetry within a tradition of occult writing in America from the turn of the 20th century.
Rafael Miguel Montes is a Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at St. Thomas University in Miami, FL. The author of Making Places/Haciendo Lugares: Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature, his work explores the intersection of memory, nostalgia, and popular culture within both the Cuban and Cuban-American community.
Tara Puri is a PhD candidate at the School of English, University of Kent, researching a thesis entitled Fabricating the Self: Women's Body and Identity in Victorian Literature. Her work focuses on the construction of women's identity and its relationship to the body through a series of conceptually linked themes, such as the display of hair and its autonomous expressive quality. The process of writing has made her more attentive to the visuality and material sensuality that is so evident in much of the literature of the period, and so analogous paintings also form a part of Puri's study. Her other areas of interest include art history, social theory, fashion studies, landscape aesthetics, and cultural studies in relation to Victorian literature.
ISSUE 5 - December 2008
Murray Leeder is a Ph.D. candidate at Carleton University in Ottawa, working on a project about links between stage magic, spiritualism and early cinema. He also has a research interest in horror films, especially those featuring ghosts, and has taught a class on the subject at the University of Calgary. His academics publications have appeared or have been accepted for publication by the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Popular Music and Society. In addition, he has written two novels, Plague of Ice and Son of Thunder, as well as almost two dozen published short stories.
Maeve Eileen Davey is a PhD student in the department of Languages and Literature at University of Ulster, researching a thesis on Gender, Body, Place: The Postcolonial Moment in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. She studied for her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Philosophy at University of Glasgow. Maeve has worked in tourism and community arts in Belfast and she is also a freelance journalist.
Ada Lovelace is a final year English Studies undergraduate student at the University of Stirling. She is currently pursuing research in Japanese Gothic, and how historically established notions of cultural identity and literary technique manifest in a modern globalised world. Her other interests include East Asian Gothic, Victorian literature, contemporary American Gothic and psychoanalytical theory. She plans to continue her studies at the University of Stirling through The M.Litt in the Gothic Imagination.
Tina Morin received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin before joining the Department of English at University College Cork in 2007. Her research interests include the works of Charles Robert Maturin, Romantic national fiction in Ireland and Scotland, and the Gothic novel. Recent publications include an article on Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, and entries on Maturin and his novels in the online Literary Encyclopedia. She is currently working on a book exploring Maturin’s novels in the context of Gothic literature in early-nineteenth century Ireland.
Wendy Haslem is currently writing Gothic Projections: From Méliès to New Media, an investigation of the evolution of the Gothic narrative and aesthetic from silent film to digital media. Her recent publications include: ‘Going Places Sitting Down: Micrographia and the Triptych' (forthcoming), Experimenta Playground: New Media Arts Catalogue (2007). She is a co-editor for the anthology Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman (2007). In the Screen Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, Wendy coordinates the MA degree in Cinema Management and she is a lecturer in the undergraduate program, teaching courses including: Film Noir, The 1950s Film, Introduction to Hollywood and Art Cinema, Hitchcock: Film and Art.
ISSUE 4 - June 2008
Dale Townshend is a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling, where he teaches on the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination. In addition to several chapters and articles on the Gothic, he is the author of The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764-1820 (2007). He has also co-edited four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2004) with Fred Botting, and Gothic Shakespeares with John Drakakis (forthcoming 2008).
Finn Ballard is a Ph.D student at the Film and Television Studies Department of Warwick University. His primary research interest is in the representation of the rural in horror cinema, particularly that produced in America since the turn of the twenty-first century, and in the relationship between such cinema and the folklore of the European Middle Ages. He hopes to follow the development of these trends in the horror cinema of upcoming years.
Jarlath Killeen is a lecturer in Victorian Literature in Trinity College Dublin. He has previously taught in University College Dublin, the University of Toronto, and Keele University. He is the author of The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave, 2005), Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Four Courts Press, 2005), and The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Ashgate, forthcoming 2007). He is currently writing a history of Gothic literature in nineteenth century Britain to be published by the University of Wales Press.
Justin Ponder is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’sModern Studies Program. His research interests include Mixed Race Studies, horror films, and postmodern theory. Currently, he is finishing his dissertation on the ethics of the Multiracial Movement in the U.S. and the complications of post-subjectivity, applying the work of Judith Butler to scholarship on mixed-race identity. He is also working on a series of articles on interracialism in horror films, exploring representations of miscegenation and mulattos as monstrosities in conjunction with North American monoracial discourse on the threats of multiraciality. The article that appears here is part of a larger project in which he applies theories of the body to the“torture-porn” horror film subgenre.
Leslie Sheldon, FRSA teaches in the English Department of the University of Ottawa, Canada. He has published in such journals as Studies in Contemporary Satire, Leviathan, Milton Quarterly, The Times Educational Supplement, The Explicator, Melville Society Extracts, TESOL Quarterly, Network, English Language Teaching Journal, The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics and written popular journalism for The Times, The Toronto Star and Classic American. He has had an extensive career in the private and public sectors, including a main Board position with an international corporation based in London, and posts at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and The University of Strathclyde. At Strathclyde, Dr. Sheldon was Director of the English Language Teaching Division (Retired) and, on Sabbatical Leave, Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa. He has been a Keynote Speaker at numerous international conferences, has broadcast on the BBC World Service and is writing his most current work on Herman Melville’s artistic response to Paradise Lost.
ISSUE 3 - November 2007
Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of several books: Horror (Batsford, 1992); The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (CUP, 1993); Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (MUP, 1996); and The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption, (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, BFI, 2003). He is also the editor several collections: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne Hollows, MUP, 1995); The Film Studies Reader (with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, Arnold/OUP, 2000); Horror, The Film Reader (Routledge, 2001); Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (with James Lyons, BFI, 2003); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis, MUP, 2003); and Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon Monteith, EUP, 2006. He was the founder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; and is currently series editor (with Eric Schaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film. He is currently writing a history of horror in the 1940s.
Brian Jarvis is senior lecturer in American Literature and Film in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University in the UK. He is the author of Postmodern Cartographies: the Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (Pluto, 1998) and Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture (Pluto, 2004) as well as essays on, amongst other things, 9/11 and popular culture, serial killer cinema, Vietnam fiction, TV prison dramas, cultural geography, dirty realism and crime writing. He is currently working on a study of recent US fiction and film that is provisionally entitled Seeing Red: Marxism and Contemporary US Visual Culture. His e-mail address is B.Jarvis@lboro.ac.uk.
Kirsty Macdonald is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the UHI Millennium Institute, based in Orkney, where she teaches literature, language and folklore of the Highlands and Islands. She completed a PhD in the fantastic in Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow in 2006. Recent publications include an article on Scottish fantasy in The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (EUP 2007), and an article on the fantastic in Revisioning Scotland: New Readings of the Cultural Canon (Peter Lang, forthcoming). She is also co-editor of this collection.
Jake Huntley is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. His is currently completing a critical/creative Phd at the same institution on Derrida, Deleuze and genre fiction.
Coralline Dupuy completed a Ph.D. in English Literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The title of her thesis is ‘Mentors in Nineteenth-century Gothic Literature and Detective Fiction.’ This work focuses on the essential part played by mentors (such as Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula) in seminal Gothic novels and detective fiction of the 19th century. Her teaching areas are Gothic novels, children’s fiction, and translation studies. Her research focuses on modern developments of the Gothic (in literature, films, illustrated books and children’s fiction) and fiction for children of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in the works of Neil Gaiman, and in contemporary crossover novels for young adults.
ISSUE 2 - March 2007
Richard Haslam is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, where he teaches courses in Irish drama, fiction, film, and poetry. His recent publications include “‘Broad Farce and Thrilling Tragedy’: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic,” in Éire-Ireland (Fall / Winter 2006), “W. B. Yeats: Snobbery as Mood and Mode,” in Études Irlandaises (Spring 2004), and “Critical Reductionism and Bernard Mac Laverty’s Cal,” in Representing the Troubles: Texts and Images, 1979-2000 (2004). In addition to publishing on Irish Gothic writers Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Oscar Wilde, he has contributed the essay “Irish Gothic” to The Routledge Companion to Gothic (forthcoming, 2007). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Unhomeliness, Interpretation, and Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction.”
Patricia MacCormack is senior lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her PhD was awarded the Mollie Holman doctorate medal for best thesis. She has published on perversion, Continental philosophy, feminism and Italian horror film. Her most recent work is on Cinesexuality, masochism, necrophilia, perversion, extreme body modification and Becoming-Monster in Alternative Europe, Women: A Cultural Review, Thirdspace, Rhizomes, Body and Society and Theory Culture and Society. Her book Cinesexuality is forthcoming from Ashgate. She is currently writing on Blanchot, Bataille and Cinecstasy.
James Rose is a freelance writer based in North Yorkshire. Predominately concerned with interpretations of contemporary horror cinema and its ongoing relationship with Gothic Literature, he has written critical texts for a range of national and international publications. Published critical essays and articles include Where the dust has settled: the Brothers Quay (Senses of Cinema, issue 32), In Amity, one man can make a difference (The Film Journal, issue 13) and Oil in the Veins - the films of Shinya Tsukamoto (Terrorizer, issue 118).Forthcoming publications include There's Nothing out There: The Landscape in Greg McLean's Wolf Creek in the February 2007 edition of SCOPE and an in-depth analysis of Neil Marshall's The Descent for Splice (Autumn 2007, ISSN 1751-7516). These and other critical works can be read at www.theblacklodge.co.uk/jamesrose
Niall Kitson is a freelance writer based in Dublin. The holder of a masters Degree in Film Studies from UCD he has been writing fiction and criticism for almost 9 years. He has had work appear in a number of titles including Mongrel, Headpress and Redeye and is a regular contributor to Film Ireland. Niall also runs a blog at www.doublebarrelled.blogspot.com and was nominated in the 2007 Irish Blog Awards. He currently works in publishing.
Joanne Watkiss is a part-time lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University and is currently writing a PhD on the space of the literary ghost in contemporary fiction. Her interests lie in the realm of the haunted house and how this space has been determined by the doctrine of philosophy. In her Doctoral thesis, she evaluates how the figure of the ghost distorts these spaces into instances of the uncanny, and in doing so, challenge metaphysical rules of 'Being'. She is presently working on absence and 'the nothing' in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.
ISSUE 1, October 2006
Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Dead Travel Fast, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Where the Bodies Are Buried, Doctor Who: Time and Relative and The Man From the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, scripting radio documentaries about Val Lewton and role-playing games and TV programs about movie heroes and Sherlock Holmes. His short story ‘Week Woman’ was adapted for the TV series The Hunger and he has directed and written a tiny short film Missing Girl. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the British Fantasy Award but doesn’t like to boast about them. He was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to University near Brighton and now lives in Islington (London). His official web-site, ‘Dr Shade’s Laboratory’ can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com.
Jarlath Killeen is a lecturer in Victorian Literature in Trinity College Dublin. He has previously taught in University College Dublin, the University of Toronto, and Keele University. He is the author of The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave, 2005), Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Four Courts Press, 2005), and The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Ashgate, forthcoming 2007). He is currently writing a history of Gothic literature in nineteenth century Britain to be published by the University of Wales Press.
John Exshaw is a freelance writer. Abridged versions of his interviews with Christopher Lee and the late Peter Cushing, which first appeared in the Bram Stoker Society Journal (Issue 6, 1994), were later published in the book, Dracula: Celebrating 100 Years (Mentor Press, 1997). He has written for Sight & Sound, and is a regular contributor to The Independent. He is currently writing a book on Italian genre films.
Maria Parsons is from Mayo and is currently completing her PhD on Menstrual Blood in Horror Fiction and Film in Trinity College Dublin. She also lectures part-time on Gothic and Horror Fiction and Film in the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology. Her Doctoral thesis investigates menstrual blood in horror fiction and film. To date, she has presented work on topics ranging from nineteenth century vampirism to monstrous menstrual girls in 1970s horror. She is currently working on the rape-revenge film genre. Her research interests are in gender studies and body theory.
Kevin Corstorphine hails from Dundee, Scotland, where he studied for his Honours degree in English and Philosophy. This was followed by an M.Litt in Romanticism from St Andrews and then back to Dundee for a PhD entitled Space and Fear in Contemporary Horror Fiction. Having completed this he embarked on a backpacking trip to Australia and the Far East and reluctantly returned to sit the viva. Now fully doctored, he is regaining his sanity and plans to lecture in English. His research interests are varied but in addition to horror and the Gothic include theoretical perspectives on popular texts, post-modern literature, identity concerns in class, gender and race, and the literary tensions and intersections of science with religion and mythology.
