Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-president of the International Gothic Association. His books include Contemporary Body Horror (2024), Gothic Cinema (2020) and Body Gothic (2014).
Brianna Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research and teaching analyze how comics, picture books, film, and other multimodal media can educate audiences about environmental issues and social injustices. She’s previously taught courses on ecohorror at Georgia Tech. Her work has recently appeared in Gothic Nature, Children’s Literature in Education, and The Lion and the Unicorn.
Stacey Anh Baran is a Literature PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis and the graduate fellow for the 2024-2025 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Thinking Food at the Intersections. Her research primarily focuses on film, horror, and food/agricultural studies. Stacey’s dissertation explores how the iconography of maize in American horror cinema reveals historical anxieties around regionality, race, and consumption in the national consciousness. She has been published in Horror Studies, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, and an edited collection titled Youth Horror Television and the Question of Fear (2024).
Ellen Boyd is a current PhD student at UC Riverside where she studies horror and archival studies. Outside of school she lives with her brood of cats, a dog, and a garden. She has been published in Horror Homeroom and Grim.
Poulomi Choudhury is a Research Ireland-funded scholar in Environmental Humanities at University College Dublin. Her doctoral project employs horror studies and critical animal studies to analyse portrayals of meat consumption in contemporary fiction, interrogating their connections to the climate crisis. She co-founded UCD’s Animal Studies Research Network and has recently held an SGSAH EARTH Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2024). She holds an MPhil in Popular Literature (awarded through the Government of Ireland Scholarship), an MA in Cultural Studies, and a BA in English Literature.
Kelly Ferguson is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Miami University in Ohio. She is a film, media, and literary scholar of cultural production coming from the Spanish-speaking world. Her current book project explores how the supposed resurgence of fascism has been represented in horror films from Spain, Latin America, and the Latinx U.S.
Madeleine Frost (she/they) is a librarian and voracious reader from New England. She holds a BA and MA in English and is currently pursuing her MLIS. While her interests are vast, she particularly enjoys examining horror alongside feminism, gender theory, and literary food theory.
Harry Gay is an Australian based writer and editor who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Advanced Studies (Honours First Class) from the University of Sydney. He has lectured at a number of international conferences, most recently in San Francisco, Glasgow and Chennai. Harry’s Honours thesis, regarding the national identity of Poland depicted in the films of Piotr Szulkin, is set to be published in the upcoming Critical Insights into Science Fiction: Exploring Posthumanism, Alternate Realities, and Cyberculture from Springer Nature. Harry is currently working on his PhD which explores the history of Australian train cinema.
Darren Gray has a research agenda that explores intersections of disability, the Gothic, horror, trauma, and activism in literature and popular culture. His work focuses on representations of impaired and enhanced bodies and examining their socio-political implications. He has published articles in Horror Homeroom and Crime Fiction Studies and has contributed chapters to the forthcoming collections Disability and the Vampire and The Cambridge Companion to David Bowie. Darren is writing his debut monograph, Horror and Disability, for the University of Wales Press Horror Studies series. You can follow him on Bluesky and X: @drdarrengray
Kelly Gredner is the host of the monthly podcast, Taboo Terrors, which dissects transgressive films, and she also co-hosts I Spit on Your Podcast that discusses all sorts of horror and cult cinema. Kelly dabbles in writing with bylines in Horror Homeroom, Grim Magazine, and the now defunct Ghouls Magazine. A proud childfree cat lady, she loves her metal like her coffee (and soul) which is black.
Paul A. J. Lewis and Peter True are both lecturers and writers from Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom. They deliver modules focusing on film studies, writing, and photography on undergraduate programmes at the University Centre in the town of Great Grimsby. They collaborate on the podcast Kill It With Fire – Cult Movies and Cult-Ure, and have also recently co-authored a chapter about Hong Kong’s cinema of the undead for a forthcoming anthology focusing on zombies in popular culture and folklore.
Sandra Mills holds a PhD from the University of Hull. Her thesis examined representations of the ‘living’ doll in contemporary horror literature and film. She has published on the work of Angela Carter, Carlo Collodi, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert Coover. Her wider research interests include literary and visual depictions of the supernatural, adaptation and intertextuality, ‘based on a true story’ horror narratives, and the digital humanities. She works in data analytics and is intrigued by intersections of technology and Gothic Studies.
Aylin Pekanık is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. She received a bachelor’s degree in English Translation and Interpretation and a master’s degree in American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University with a thesis on the gendered design of female coded androids in contemporary science fiction films. Her research interests include audiovisual media studies, ludology, gender and queer studies, speculative fiction, and horror fiction. She is currently teaching courses on race and ethnicity and gender studies in American culture at Bilkent University and working on her PhD dissertation titled “Transgressive Monstrosity In Contemporary American Horror Fiction Anthologies” which examines the evolution and reclamation of queer monstrosity in horror short story anthologies.
Morgan Pinder is a writer, graduate researcher and PhD Candidate at Deakin University in Australia. Their research is in ecocriticism, monstrosity and representation in video games. Morgan’s most recent publication is Negotiating Anthropocentrism in Cozy Games for Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies.
Isaiah Frost Rivera (He/They) is a third-year PhD student in the African and African Diaspora Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. They hold a bachelor’s from CUNY Brooklyn College in English with a double minor in LGBTQ Studies and Puerto Rican & Latino Studies. They also hold a master’s in Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Studies from Columbia University, as well as a master’s in English from Lehigh University. His research interests include horror media, black queer grief, and Afrodiasporic self-sovereignty in the digital age. Isaiah’s writings have been featured in Lolwe, Horror Homeroom, and Speculative Nonfiction. His poem “The Commuters” won first prize in the 2018-2019 CUNY Labor Arts “Making Work Visible” contest. To read more of their work, visit Isaiah’s WordPress blog The Poetic Xenolith, where he writes critical essays about horror media.
Carrie Syme (she/her) is an independent writer and researcher. She is also the owner and creator of Horror Lex (https://horrorlex.com), the first and only comprehensive database of academic writing on horror and horror-adjacent cinema. She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from NYU, which is where she started cultivating a now near-daily habit of watching horror and cult movies. During the day, Carrie is a lawyer with an active practice, which is a different sort of horror experience. She lives with her husband, one good cat, and one very bad cat in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarah Thompson is a current MA student at Lehigh University, where she studies horror and science studies. Before attending Lehigh, she received a BS in Biology and BA in English. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her cat and sewing.
