Melody Blackmore is a PhD researcher in Film and Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University, where she is working on an examination of the symbolic role of landscape as an unconscious space for madness in contemporary horror films. Having received a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and an MA in Interdisciplinary Psychology, she has devoted many years to researching the role of psychoanalysis in Gothic literature and film.
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, nostalgia and digital literacy. A former blogger for Entertainment Weekly, she has presented her research at various fan and academic conferences. She co-edited (with Dawn Keetley) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018) and her experimental podcast When the Woman Screams, which examines the reasons why women scream in horror films, dropped its first season in August. You can find her at www.HorrorHomeroom.com, a website she co-founded.
AD Fredline is a senior honors student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Sociology, and Political Science at Midwestern State University. Their research interests include deviancy theory, LGBTQ+ studies, and power structures. You may follow them on Twitter @ADFredline.
Phil Hobbins-White is a Film Studies lecturer in Cambridge, UK. He completed a Masters in Media, Culture and Communication in 2011, writing his dissertation about gender in contemporary horror films. He completed an additional Masters in Film, Television and Screen Media in 2016, writing his dissertation about film festivals and independent filmmaking. He has contributed several articles to film websites and magazines, and is currently writing a chapter about The Descent for a forthcoming horror film book.
Taylor Hughes has an MA in history from McGill University, where she studied death, burial practices, and public health in late-19th century Montreal. She is broadly interested in horror literature, folklore, and depictions of death in media. She can be found on Twitter @avocado_ghost
Beth Kattelman is an associate professor at The Ohio State University where she currently serves as the Curator of Theatre for the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from Ohio State, and her research focuses on horror entertainments, the history of magic and conjuring, and LGBTQ studies. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Horror Studies, Revenant, Theatre Journal, and The Puppetry Journal.
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 the contemporary horror film as well as a collection of essays and a monograph on folk horror. She writes regularly for a horror website she co-created, www.HorrorHomeroom.com.
Laura R. Kremmel is an assistant professor in the Humanities department at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. She specializes in Gothic Studies, British Romanticism, Medical Humanities, and the History of Medicine. She’s currently working on her first book, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies.
Eric J. Lawrence received his MA in English Literature from California State University at Northridge in 2019. Over the past two decades, he has worked as the Music Librarian and a regular host, DJ, and arts contributor to KCRW, the acclaimed public radio station based in Santa Monica, CA. He is excited to return to his first love – academia – and plans to begin working on a doctorate in film studies in the near future.
Kristen Ann Leer is a recent graduate from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, having earned a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Psychology, Classic Civilization, and Religious Studies. She has a chapter on the film Gladiator in one forthcoming edited collection and an analysis on social media responses to COVID-19 in the collection Pandemic Rhetoric, which is also forthcoming.
Avalon A. Manly has a master’s from Western New Mexico University and has been teaching literature at the secondary level since 2011. Her thesis, “Insist on Your Cup of Stars: Gothic Literature as a Guide to Historical Anxieties About Gender and Sexuality,” was accepted to present at 2020’s Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference, and her fiction has appeared in numerous collections, including Honey Island Swamp Child (2015) and The Red Wheelbarrow Review (2020).
Marc Olivier is a professor of French Studies at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on European cinema, literature, and critical theory. His recent book, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (Indiana University Press, 2020) takes the nonhuman turn in philosophy as inspiration for reading horror through common household objects. His publications in journals such as Technology & Culture, The Journal of Popular Film & Television, and The Journal of Popular Culture focus on how emerging technologies interact with visual media and literature. He has contributed to books on topics as diverse as entomology, industrial design, microscopy, and the Gothic aspects of new media. He is currently working on a statistical analysis of tool use in slasher films.
Cody Parish is an educator and freelance writer who covers American horror cinema and culture. He has published with Horror Homeroom and PopMatters and has a chapter in a forthcoming edited collection about James Wan’s films, which will be released in 2021.
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 postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute and Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Harriet’s main areas of teaching and research expertise lie in modern and contemporary American fiction, genre theory, critical race theory, and masculinity studies. Her work has featured in a variety of international journals, including the Cormac McCarthy Journal, the European Journal of American Studies, the Horror Studies Journal, the Gothic Nature Journal, the Journal of American Studies and the European Journal of American Culture. Her first monograph, From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977, was published in late 2018 as part of Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. Harriet is currently completing her second monograph on masculinity in contemporary Asian American crime fiction and is also in the process of co-editing a ‘True Crime’ special issue of the Edinburgh University Press Crime Fiction Studies journal.
