Contributors

Michael Cerliano is a doctoral student in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University. His research focuses on rhetoric, horror, and the occult. He lives in Denton, Texas. 

David Evans-Powell is a part-time doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, whose thesis examines existing frameworks that attempt to define folk horror. He currently works in the development office at Birmingham, having worked for almost a decade in the cultural sector. He has published several articles on the British horror website Horrifiedmagazine.co.uk, as well as monographs on the 1984 Doctor Who serial The Awakening (Obverse Books, 2020) and on the 1971 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Liverpool University Press, 2021). He is currently writing an article for Helleborezine for their forthcoming Unearthing issue, a series of articles for a Hammer Horror retrospective at Horrifiedmagazine, and an essay for a planned collection on critical approaches to horror in Doctor Who.

Matthias Hurst is Professor of Film Studies at Bard College Berlin. He has published on film history, genre films and fantastic literature and film, including Im Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung. Von Schillers Geisterseher zur TV-Serie The X-Files: Rationalismus und Irrationalismus in Literatur, Film und Fernsehen 1786-1999 (2001); „Blutige Küsse. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Der Vampir als Wunschbild und Angsttraum des Mannes“ (2002); „Dialektik des Aliens. Darstellungen und Interpretationen von Außerirdischen in Film und Fernsehen“ (2008); „Väter und Söhne. Das Motiv der Versöhnung in Star Wars“ (2010); „Subjectivity Unleashed: Haute Tension” (2012); „Film(t)räume. Raum und Raumerfahrung im fantastischen Kino“ (2014); „Diesseits und jenseits der Frontier. Natur und Gesellschaft im amerikanischen Westernfilm“ (2017); „Visions of Nature and Ecological Thought in German Feature Films“ (2017); and „Star Trek Discovery – Where No Star Trek Series Has Gone Before? Utopie in Wiederholungen und Variationen“ (2020).

Michael Jacob is a PhD candidate in the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he has taught English for the past eight years. His research centers on Celtic culture, particularly Irish language revitalization through music and performance.

David Annwn Jones is author of Gothic Machine (University of Wales Press, 2011), Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Gothic Effigy (Manchester University Press, 2018), Re-Envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror (University of Wales Press, 2018) and “Green Trends in Euro-Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (2020). Affiliated to the Open University in Manchester and Leeds, UK, and raised at Red Bank School, Annwn Jones spoke to Mary Bell on a daily basis from 1969-72.

Dawn Keetley is Professor of English and Film at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem PA. She is author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2017) and editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2020). She has edited one collection and co-edited a second on The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2014 & 2018) and is also co-editor of Plant Horror (Palgrave, 2016) and The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). She is currently working on a collection of essays and a monograph on folk horror. She co-runs a horror website, HorrorHomeroom.com.

Paul A. J. Lewis is a writer, photographer and lecturer, who has been teaching in higher education since 2001 and has been writing about genre cinema for various outlets since the mid-2000s. He is also a sometimes filmmaker (when time and inspiration allow) with regional filmmaking collective Grimnir Pictures, most recently co-writing and directing Grimnir’s short films “Silent Hero” and “The Imposter.” He has written and delivered modules for the University Centre, Grimsby’s degree level provision in professional and creative writing, English literature, photography, and film and television production. Visual culture in all its forms is his inspiration, and he has been an avowed cinephile since childhood. In 2007, he wrote an MA in Critical Approaches to International Media, and was previously a programme leader on an undergraduate English Studies programme. Currently, he is course convenor for the institution’s HE photography programmes, taking sole responsibility for writing and managing the FdA in Photography and BA(Hons) in Photography. His PhD focuses on Paul Verhoeven’s American films, from RoboCop (1987) to Hollow Man (2000), exploring their complex relationship with the eras of Reagan and Bush – from Star Wars to the First Gulf War. Prior to embarking on his PhD, Paul completed his Master’s Degree in Contemporary Literature and Film in 2000, his thesis examining gender and violence in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1982). His undergraduate degree was in English and Social Science. 

Jessica Parant is also known as Spinster # 1 of the Spinsters of Horror and the co-host of the podcast, I Spit on Your Podcast. When not working her day job as a Security Compliance Specialist for an IT company, she is busy following her love and passion for horror with writing, researching, and podcasting.  You can find her at her website, www.spinstersofhorror.com, and on social media: Twitter: @SpectralJess 07, @HorrorSpinsters; IG: @spectraljess07, @spinstersofhorror; and Facebook: Spinsters of Horror.

Kern Robinson is a folk horror PhD student at Falmouth University in the UK. He has previously presented at their Folk Horror in the 21st Century conference in 2019.

Lyndsay Townsend is a recent MLitt Film and Television Studies graduate from the University of Glasgow, with research interests in horror and phenomenology. Both of her academic dissertations have focused on the field of Folk Horror, and recently her MLitt dissertation (“Sense and Texture in Contemporary Folk Horror Cinema”) was awarded the Edinburgh University Press Award for academic excellence. She is currently planning a PhD surrounding the wider sensory affect of Folk Horror, which she plans to begin at the University of St. Andrews in September 2021.

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