Stella Castelli holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics and Theory and History of Photography as well as an MA in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Zurich. She wrote her MA thesis on Aestheticized Representations of Death in American Literature and Film: Poe, Hitchcock, Craven, exploring repressions of death and their symptomatic reappearance in contemporary American culture. She is currently affiliated with the University of Zurich where she is working on her doctoral dissertation Death is Served: American Recipes for Murder – A Serial Compulsion furthering her research within this field with a specific interest in the serial depiction of death. Among articles she has published are texts focusing on the ambiguous figure of the clown, the representation of the female body in The Stepford Wives and Her as well as Foucauldian reading of Ida Lupino’s film noir Hitchhiker. Her research interests include American cultural studies, seriality and the serial, film, in particular cinematic renditions of horror, terror, fear and death, literary and cultural theory in particular Benjamin, Freud, Foucault, Blanchot and Kristeva.
Wickham Clayton is a Lecturer in Film Production at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. He is author of See!Hear!Cut!Kill!: Experiencing Friday the 13th (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), and editor of Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium: New Heart and New Spirit (Manchester University Press, 2020).
Fraser Coffeen is a former staff writer for Sports Blog Nation affiliate Bloody Elbow and one of the founding editors of LiverKick.com. His work has been published in One Night Only magazine and the book How to Analyze and Review Comics (coming in 2020 from Sequart), in addition to numerous websites. In addition to writing, he has worked as a comic book model, professional wrestling ring announcer, human blockhead, theater blood FX artist, and, by day, middle school principal. Fraser is a former member of Chicago’s critically acclaimed Defiant Theater, and a graduate of Northwestern University and the National College of Education at National Louis University.
Caitlin Duffy is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Stony Brook University in New York. Her scholarly interests include 19th century American gothic literature and American horror cinema. She is particularly interested in exploring how capitalism and liberalism influences and colors gothic texts. Her work has been published in The Journal of Dracula Studies and Poe Studies. Caitlin currently teaches courses in film, literature, and writing at Stony Brook University.
Dustin Dunaway is the Chair of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Pueblo Community College in Pueblo, Colorado. He holds a Masters Degree in Communication from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His other publications include “Hypermasculinity as Power Currency in the Post-Apocalyptic Political Economy” in McFarland’s The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics. He also creates video essays as part of Cool Channel Classroom, presents at several conferences as part of the Colorado Coalition for Popular Culture Scholarship, and appears as a regular guest on The Deconstruction Workers podcast.
Elizabeth Erwin is a writer, assistant professor/librarian, and digital storyteller. She is currently working on her PhD in English and received her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and her MA in American Studies from Lehigh University. Her research interests include American horror, serialized storytelling, LGBT+ media representation, nostalgia and digital literacy. A former blogger for Entertainment Weekly, she has presented her research at various fan and academic conferences and has worked on a number of digital history projects, including The Veterans Empathy Project and Beyond Steel. She co-edited (with Dawn Keetley) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018) and her next co-edited collection (with Gwen Hofmann) on horror-comedy films is under contract (LUP). You can find her podcasting and writing about all things horror at www.HorrorHomeroom.com, a website she co-founded.
Brian Fanelli is a previous contributor to Horror Homeroom. He also writes about the genre for Signal Horizon, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and HorrOrigins. His creative writing has been published in The Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today, Paterson Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Blue Collar Review, and elsewhere. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. He is an assistant professor of English at Lackawanna College. Recently, he joined Twitter.
David Ruis Fisher is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Kansas where he has taught classes in Acting, Public Speaking as Performance, Introduction to Theatre, and Theatre History II. Recent publication includes a performance review of Luis Valdez’s revival of Zoot Suit for Theatre Journal (June 2018). Research interests include: Latinx Theatre and Performance, African American Theatre and Performance, Dramaturgy, Performance Studies, Staging Intimacy on Stage and in Film, Popular Culture Studies, and Acting/Directing Theory.
Erin Harrington is a lecturer in critical and cultural theory at the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (Routledge, 2017). Recent publications and works in progress consider genre in the New Zealand web series Ao-terror-oa, televised funeral practice in the reality series The Casketeers, female-helmed horror anthologies, the appropriation of horror comedy mockumentary series Wellington Paranormal by the New Zealand Police, theatrical adaptations of Evil Dead, and the affective potentials, aesthetics and rituals of slow horror. She also works as a theatre and arts critic, and appears regularly as a speaker and panelist.
Cory Hasabeard is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and Memphis Theological Seminary, where he focused on Liberation Theology and the Political Ideology of Jesus. He is currently a theologian in residence at Borderland Mission in Nashville, Tennessee. Cory brings his background in Black Liberation Theology, Feminist Theology, and Queer Theology to his cultural analysis. He seeks to expose the systemic oppression white straight men have benefited from by using cultural artifacts and writing in a way that elicits a change in the oppressor.
Matthew Jones is an independent film scholar and film studies, photography and media teacher at Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics and Estrella Mountain Community College with a focused interest in genres and genre films, most notably horror, classical gangster and the Western. His latest writing on the Western, Demystifying the Myth: The Western’s Classical Phase, can be seen at Deep Focus Review, while his most recent study, Antagonistic Nature: The Loss of Anthropocentric Authority in Eco-Horror of the 1970s and 1980s is about to surface. He is also a cinematographer, photographer and associate member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars who tweets @ghostofFire. Matthew received his BA in Media Studies from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and his MH in Art and Visual Media from Tiffin University.
Dawn Keetley is professor of English, teaching horror/gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has most recently published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Popular Television, Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020) and We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014). She has also coedited (with Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016), (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017), and (with Elizabeth Erwin) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). Her monograph, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Keetley is working on essays on ecohorror and on the contemporary horror film as well as a monograph on folk horror. She writes regularly for Horror Homeroom, which she co-founded, and her personal website is here.
Kom Kunyosying completed a PhD in English at the University of Oregon where he studied the overlap between iconic and ethnic representation in U.S. comics in relationship to other visual and prose media. He has published essays on the rise of geek culture and the hyperreal hillbilly (with Carter Soles) and on metonymy and ecology in Charles Burns’s Black Hole. He teaches literature and writing at Nashua Community College.
Wade Newhouse is professor of English and program director for Theatre and Musical Theatre at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC. He teaches a wide range of courses including Southern Literature, Children’s Literature, and The Gothic, and he has published articles and book chapters on such writers as William Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, and Randall Kenan. He directs one production per year in the William Peace University Theatre program and acts in local theatrical companies, most recently playing leading roles in Deathtrap, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth. He also writes fiction and has published a handful of horror and science fiction stories in online zines.
Todd K. Platts is associate professor of sociology at Piedmont Virginia Community College. He has published many articles and book chapters on horror cinema. His recent publications include “Evolution and Slasher Films” (co-authored with Mathias Clasen) and “‘Horror Movies are Already Telling the Story…’ of Trump’s America” (coauthored with Kibiriti Majuto) His forthcoming publications include “Reviewing Get Out’s Reviews: What Critics Discussed and How Their Race Mattered” (coauthored with David Brunsma) and “The Unmade Undead: A Postmortem of the Post-9/11 Zombie Cycle.” He is currently co-editing Blumhouse Production: The New House of Horror with Mathias Clasen and Victoria McCollum.
Ethan Robles is a writer working out of Boston, MA. His fiction has appeared in Aphotic Realm, Sirens Call eZine, and Shotgun Honey. He is a staff writer at morbidlybeautiful.com and a frequent guest writer at horrorhomeroom.com. You can follow him on twitter @roblecop.
Carter Soles is associate professor of Film Studies in the English Department at SUNY Brockport. He has written on the cannibalistic hillbilly in 1970’s slasher films for Ecocinema: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012), on petroculture, gender, and genre in the Mad Max franchise for Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington Books, 2019), and, with Kom Kunyosying, on the hyperreal hillbilly in The Walking Dead for The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). He is currently co-editing an ecohorror anthology with Christy Tidwell and writing a book on cinematic ecohorror.
Brennan Thomas is an associate professor of English at Saint Francis University and directs the university’s writing center. She has published scholarly articles on the social, political and consumerist elements of the films Casablanca, A Christmas Story, Bambi, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as well as the television series South Park.
Jason Wallin is Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum (Palgrave MacMillan), Arts-based Inquiry: A Critique and Proposal (Sense Publishers) and co-producer of the extreme music documentary BLEKKMETAL (Grimposium, Uneasy Sleeper). Growing up, one of the only good things about my name was its association to the Friday the 13th franchise.
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is a professor at Loyola Marymount University, as well as an actor, director and stage combat choreographer. He is the author and editor of over two dozen books, including Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, Back from the Dead: Reading Remakes of Romero’s Zombie Films as Markers of their Time, The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films, The Streaming of Hill House, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Uncovering Stranger Things. He has also written over a hundred journal articles and book chapters on everything from Godzilla to exorcisms, Jesuit horror to African cinema. You can find out more of his publications at www.SomethingWetmoreThisWayComes.com.
