Kat Albrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and a Judicial Innovation Fellow at Georgetown Law School. She is a legally trained sociologist and computational social scientist studying how complex data can inform policy, with particular emphasis on the nexus of fear, criminal data, and the law. She received her PhD and JD from Northwestern University. Her research has been recently published or if forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Nature Human Behavior, among others. Her horror specialities are low-budget, no-budget, and practical special effects horror.
Jacob Babb is Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University. He publishes on composition and writing program administration, as well as on science fiction and horror. He has published articles in Composition Forum, Composition Studies, Harlot, and WPA: Writing Program Administration and chapters in several edited collections. He is the co-editor of WPAs in Transition: Navigating Educational Leadership Positions (Utah State UP, 2018) and The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration (Utah State UP, 2020).
Alissa Burger is Associate Professor of English at Culver-Stockton College, where she teaches a wide range of writing and literature courses, including Gender in Literature, Period Studies: Victorian Gothic, and a single-author seminar on Stephen King. She is a prolific scholar of literary studies and popular culture, with recent publications including IT, Chapters 1 and 2 (Devil’s Advocates Series; Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
David Edwards lectures on the Acting for Stage & Screen and Directing & Theatre Making programmes at The Northern School of Art. He read English at King’s College London before training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and working professionally as an actor/director. In 2006 he established Vivid Theatre Company which produced classical drama, contemporary plays and new writing. His research focuses on psychophysical performance techniques, ensemble performance methodologies and the consideration of mental health in the horror genre. Recent conference and writing work have included Psychophysical Acting and the Representation of OCD in performance and presenting at a variety of horror conferences including Fear 2000, CineExcess and SWPACA. His 2024 published work will focus primarily on horror and mental health including the subgenres of the zombie, the slasher movement and the A24 production company.
Elizabeth Erwin was raised on a steady diet of ABC soap operas, Sweet Valley High books, and 1940s horror. This left her with an affinity for big hair and dramatic monologues. She has written extensively on horror film and popular culture and is co-creator of Horror Homeroom, a website/podcast that examines horror narratives from an academic perspective. She is co-editor (with Dawn Keetley) of The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead: Essays on the Television Series and Comics (McFarland, 2018) and has written for The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and Entertainment Weekly. She is currently working on a series of video essays exploring the mainstreaming of horror through television and YouTube. Her digital humanities based dissertation, When the Woman Screams, examines the horror film scream as a site of cultural resistance.
Emma Hallock is a writer and fan of all things macabre. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Utah State University in 2020. These days she puts her degree to good use by writing about death studies, fan studies, and horror. She recently moved back to the United States from Iceland, but a piece of her heart will always live in Hólavallagarður cemetery.
Steffen Hantke has edited Horror, a special topic issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is also author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature (1994), Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016), and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023).
Gavin Hurley is an Associate Professor of Communication & Literature at Ave Maria University where he teaches writing, rhetoric, journalism, and literature. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rhode Island, a M.A. in writing arts from Rowan University, and a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Joseph’s University. His articles have appeared in academic journals such as the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Journal of Communication and Religion, and Horror Studies. He has additionally published essays in various scholarly essay collections, including Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in National Context and Abroad (University Press of Mississippi, 2023) and Virtual Dark Tourism: Ghost Roads (Palgrave, 2018). His book The Rhetorical Dialectics of Catholic Horror Literature is expected to be published by Lehigh University Press in 2024.
Dawn Keetley is Professor of English and Film at Lehigh University. She is author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020), co-editor (with Angela Tenga) of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016), and co-editor (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) of The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). She has also edited a collection on The Walking Dead and co-edited (with Elizabeth Erwin) a second. She has recently published numerous articles on folk horror, has co-edited (with Ruth Heholt) Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (University of Wales Press, 2023) and has a short book, Folk Gothic (2023), forthcoming from the Cambridge Gothic Elements series. She writes regularly for a website she co-founded, Horror Homeroom.
Marco Malvestio is an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua. Following a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Padua, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. His publications include The Conflict Revisited: The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction (Peter Lang, 2021) and Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene (Nottetempo, 2021) as well as the edited volumes Vecchi maestri e nuovi mostri: Tendenze e prospettive della letteratura horror all’inizio del nuovo millennio (Mimesis, 2019; with Valentina Sturli) and Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2023; with Stefano Serafini).
Irene Pagano (she/they) is a Research Master’s student in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, where she graduated with Honours with a dissertation about the portrayal of the Self/Other boundary and its destabilisation in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Her research interests include trauma and sexuality studies, British and German 20th century literature, and horror literature and media.
Isaiah Frost Rivera (He/They) is a Staten Island born and raised scholar, maker, and black digital speculator pursuing his PhD in the African and African Diaspora Studies program at University of Austin, Texas. His research interests include multimodal performances of black queer metamodernism, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean political formations, and the intersections between horror and retributive justice in the digital age. To read more of their work, visit Isaiah’s WordPress blog The Poetic Xenolith, where he writes critical essays about horror films and popular media.
Amira Shokr earned her BA and MA in English from Lehigh University. Her academic interests include Medieval literature, critical horror studies, media and film studies. Amira currently resides in Blairstown, New Jersey where she teaches English and history.
Carina Stopenski (they/them) is a writer, teacher, and librarian based out of Pittsburgh, PA. Carina received their BFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, their MSLS in Library Science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and their MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. Carina has presented on the topics of mutilation, abject terrors, and subversive diegesis at various conferences, and their article “Exploring Mutilation: Women, Affect, and the Body Horror Genre,” published in [sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, solidified their scholarly focus of horror media studies. Their creative work has been featured in or is forthcoming from Papeachu Review, God’s Cruel Joke, iō Literary Journal, and Fauxmoir, among others. You can follow their work at www.carinastopenskiwriter.com.
