phd in fantasy literature

Oxford Fantasy Literature

Expanding the english faculty’s great writers inspire podcasts: a pilot study.

Oxford plays a starring role in the history of fantasy literature. A huge number of beloved fantasy authors studied or taught at the university over the course of their careers, including J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and Philip Pullman, to name just a few. Fantasy is arguably one of the most important contemporary literary genres: extraordinarily popular, constantly expanding and diversifying, testing the boundaries of style, structure, and genre. Since 2018 the English Faculty’s fantasy research cluster , headed by Prof. Carolyne Larrington and Dr Stuart Lee, has sought to draw on Oxford’s rich resources to foreground exciting new work on fantasy literature and showcase new authors in podcasts, videos, and lectures accessible to the public. From The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones to N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy , Oxford faculty and students are producing a huge range of scholarly responses to field-defining fantasy.

This project begins a new series of the popular Oxford Fantasy podcast, featuring interviews and lectures with Oxford faculty and students, discussions with authors and archivists, and more. Watch this space for the publication of a comprehensive handlist of Oxford’s fantasy-related archival holdings, as well as the release of a series of teaching resource packs with assignments, lesson plans, and reading lists revolving around fantasy texts by Oxford authors, produced by project research officer Dr Caroline Batten.

This project also seeks to test drive a public engagement model for the English Faculty: mapping out the process by which a research cluster can streamline the creation of podcasts to increase public engagement with research, solicit contributions amongst research students and professional support staff, and engage younger students with Faculty research activities and resources. At the conclusion of the project, we’ll release a report and public engagement guide available to all members of the English Faculty, evaluating our project's workflow and impact and providing a blueprint for other research groups to create their own public engagement projects, including a guide to podcasting.

We are very interested in your feedback on the fantasy literature podcasts. If you are using them please take a few minutes to complete our survey at: https://oxford.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/oxford-fantasy-podcasts

Explore Fantasy Literature resources on Great Writers Inspire

Introduction to Fantasy

Modern Fairies

Tolkien at Oxford

Fantasy Literature: Further Thinking

Fantasy at Oxford

Tweets by Oxford Fantasy

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• Postgraduate study
• Taught degree programmes A‑Z
• English Literature: Fantasy

Postgraduate taught  

English Literature: Fantasy MLitt

Are you a fan of fantasy fiction? Or are you simply curious as to why the fantastic can be found all around us in the 21st century, from videogames and films to poetry, songs, television, novel series, and so-called 'mainstream' fiction? This programme allows you to engage with one of the most vibrant literary genres of the last two centuries - and a major cultural phenomenon of our time.

• Academic contact: Dr Will Tattersdill:  [email protected]
• Teaching start: September
• MLitt: 12 months full-time; 24 months part‑time

Register your interest for more information

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Why this programme

• You will be supported by a friendly, internationally acclaimed team of scholars working in all areas of the arts, from literature and comics to film, TV, education, history of art and modern languages.
• Fantasy-related events are organised each year, from conferences to field trips, from talks and conversations involving writers, editors and visiting scholars to reading parties, film showings and exhibitions.
• You will be a member of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow.
• You will have access to world class libraries, museums, galleries, theatres and teaching/research facilities.
• You will have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the vibrant cultural scene of Glasgow itself, which attracts major fantasy-related conventions and is famous throughout the world for its musical, artistic, technological and literary energy.
• Listen to our podcast: Stories from Glasgow – Roll for Storytelling where PhD candidate Emma French talks about transformative storytelling and Dungeons & Dragons.

Programme structure

The programme involves core and optional taught sessions, followed by a period of research and writing over the summer when you will undertake supervised independent work on a special topic of your choice, researching, planning and writing a 15,000 word dissertation.

Full-time students

Semester 1 - september to december.

• ENGLISH LITERATURE RESEARCH TRAINING COURSE
• FANTASY 1: 1780-1950
• One optional course

Semester 2 - January to March

• FANTASY 2: 1950 TO THE PRESENT
• Two optional courses

Summer - April to September

• FANTASY DISSERTATION

All taught courses are 20 credits and are delivered in weekly 2-hour seminars or equivalent.

Seminars are taught to the extent that the student members meet regularly with a tutor and proceed through a planned sequence of reading and discussion. The working style, however, is exploratory rather than didactic; students are expected to engage fully with primary sources, to develop, express and take responsibility for their own opinions and to work towards independent argument and expression in their resulting coursework and dissertation.

Optional courses

You may choose from the available optional courses offered by any of the Masters programmes in the School of Critical Studies; see in particular the courses listed under the MLitt English Literature  general pathway . You may also opt for courses from other Masters programmes in the College of Arts & Humanities (subject to approval by the relevant convener). One course can be taken at Honours level.

Examples of possible options include:

• FANTASY ACROSS MEDIA
• CHILDREN'S FANTASY LITERATURE
• REALISM AND FANTASY IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE (PGT)
• FUTURES: UNBUNDLING THE NOW
• FANTASIES OF ENERGY (PGT)
• CREATIVE WRITING FICTION WORKSHOP (CROSS-DISCIPLINE)
• EARLY MODERN MYTHMAKING
• VICTORIAN LITERATURE BEYOND THE HUMAN
• CREATIVE WRITING FICTION
• SCIENCE FICTION 1945-PRESENT
• THE TOMORROW PEOPLE: SPECULATIVE BODIES AND MINDS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
• LOVE, DEATH, AND DRAGONS: MEDIEVALISM AND FANTASY
• WORLD-BUILDING

 For further information please contact the convener.

Programme alteration or discontinuation The University of Glasgow endeavours to run all programmes as advertised. In exceptional circumstances, however, the University may withdraw or alter a programme. For more information, please see: Student contract .

Career prospects

The critical and analytical skills you develop and the ability to conduct rigorous independent study make this programme an ideal step towards an academic career. Graduates from English Literature have also gone on to careers in:

• heritage sector

Fees & funding

Tuition fees for 2024-25

• Full-time fee: £10650
• Part-time fee: £1184 per 20 credits

International & EU

• Full-time fee: £24000

International and EU applicants are required to pay a deposit of  £2000 within four weeks  of an offer being made.

Deposits: terms & conditions

This programme requires some students to pay a deposit to secure their place.

If you are an international student, we will only issue a Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) once the deposit has been paid.

Your offer letter will state:

• how to pay the deposit payment
• the deadline for paying the deposit

The following guidelines will apply in determining whether a deposit will be refunded. Where the deposit is refunded, a 25% handling fee will be deducted.

Deposits will be refunded to applicants under the following circumstances:

• Where the University is unable to offer you a place.
• Where the applicant has personal circumstances such as illness, bereavement or other family situations that has prevented them coming to the UK. Medical or other proof may be requested.
• Applicant can prove that they have applied for a visa to attend the University of Glasgow, but the VISA has been refused. The applicant must have shown 'real intent' to study at the University of Glasgow but has been unable to obtain their visa.
• Applicant does not meet his / her conditions of offer: this may be academic or language test requirements. Satisfactory evidence must be uploaded to the student’s applicant self-service to prove that they have not met the conditions of their offer (note that applicants who do not meet the language condition of their offer must show reasonable attempt to meet this, i.e. they must provide a language test which was taken after the date that the deposit was paid).

Deposits will not be refunded to applicants under the following circumstances:

• Applicant has decided to defer – in this situation the University will retain the deposit and credit it against the applicant’s account for securing their place for the following year of entry.

Refund requests must be made within 30 days of the programme start date stated on your offer letter.

Requests made after this date will be subject to discretion.

• Find out more about Deposits

Additional fees

• Fee for re-assessment of a dissertation (PGT programme): £370
• Submission of thesis after deadline lapsed: £350
• Registration/exam only fee: £170

Funding opportunities

• Alexander and Dixon Scholarship (Bryce Bequest)

The Bryce Bequest was made by the late Professor John Cameron Bryce in memory of Professor Peter Alexander, former Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and in memory of Professor W. MacNeile Dixon.  The bequest supports exceptional MLitt students on any of the taught programmes in English Literature.

Further details can be found  here.

• University of Glasgow College of Arts and Humanities South Asia Award

The College of Arts and Humanties warmly welcomes applications from highly qualified applicants to our masters programmes. We are offering 4 scholarships for postgraduate taught programmes for Academic Session 2024-25.

• College of Arts Widening Participation Postgraduate Taught Scholarships

The College of Arts is pleased to be offering Widening Participation Postgraduate Taught scholarships to support with studying a one-year postgraduate taught programme (either full-time across one year, or part-time across two years) in the College.  The scholarships include a full fee waiver at the 'Home' tuition fee rate and a stipend (the stipend rate for 2024/25 is £17,039) and are available to candidates who meet the University's Widening Participation criteria. 

• Beatrix Whistler and James McNeill Whistler Scholarship

The Beatrix Whistler and James McNeill Whistler Scholarships originate with an important collection of works by Whistler gifted by Miss Rosalind Birnie Philip to the University in 1935. Since then, and thanks to further gifts and acquisitions, the Hunterian has come to hold one of the two leading collections of Whistler’s work in the world and History of Art (SCCA) has become an international centre of expertise for the study of Whistler and his 19th century world.  

At her death in 1958, Miss Birnie Philip, Whistler’s heir and executrix, bequeathed the remainder of her art collection to the University, together with part of her residual estate for the purpose of establishing a scholarship scheme for students engaged in any branch of learning within the College of Arts & Humanities. In 2019, the Whistler scholarships scheme was revised in acknowledgement of the continuing links between Miss Birnie Philip’s 1958 bequest of artworks and her wish to support student learning at the University. 

The Whistler Scholarships are open to students in all disciplines of the College of Arts & Humanities. The award committee is willing to consider both individual applications AND joint applications (from up to THREE students). Innovative interdisciplinary work is particularly encouraged. However, students may only involve themselves in the submission of ONE application (individual OR joint).

The Whistler Scholarships cover travel, accommodation and subsistence expenses ONLY. However, in the case of Whistler-related proposals submitted under Scheme 1 additional funds may be made available at the discretion of the Scholarship Committee to cover research or other relevant expenses.

• Southeast Asia Distinction Award

The University of Glasgow is excited to announce the new Southeast Asia Distinction Award for highly qualified students from this region. This scholarship is available to students starting a postgraduate taught Masters programme on any eligible degree programme for Academic Session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a tuition fee discount.

• GREAT Scholarships 2024- Greece, Nigeria, Egypt and Turkey

In partnership with the British Council and the GREAT Britain Campaign, University of Glasgow is offering 4 scholarships to students in Greece, Nigeria, Egypt and Turkey applying for postgraduate courses in any subject (excluding MBA and MSc by Research courses). All eligible courses can be viewed under the 'eligible programmes' tab on this webpage. 

The scholarship offers financial support of £10,000 to students pursuing one-year postgraduate study in the UK. This discount cannot be combined with another University scholarship.

• The Snowdon Trust Master’s Scholarship

The Snowdon Trust Master’s Scholarship is accelerating exceptional Disabled Students through masters’ programmes into leadership positions to create change.

Do you have ambitions to change the world? Are you pioneering in your field? Are you creating change for Disabled People? Let us open some doors.

We are searching for individuals who choose to use their lived experience of disabling barriers to make a difference. To create change.

Applications open 2pm 15 January 2024.

Please see  Snowdon Trust, Investing in Disabled Students  website for more details.

• Banco de Mexico

The Mexican National Bank (Banco de Mexico) provides special loans for students who wish to undertake a programme of postgraduate study. The University of Glasgow in partnership with Bank of Mexico FIDERH is offering a fee discount to holders of a Bank of Mexico FIDERH loan. See the FIDERH website for further information.

• Erasmus+ Master Degree Loans

Erasmus+ Master Degree Loans are EU-guaranteed loans with favourable pay-back terms. They’re designed to help prospective students finance their Master’s courses in an Erasmus+ Programme country while leaving as little of a lasting economic footprint as possible.

The scheme is designed to provide postgraduate students with the means to pay their tuition and living expenses – thereby allowing individuals to focus on their degree instead of managing their bank balance. The programme aims to be as inclusive as possible, working under the following guidelines:

• No need for collateral from students or parents - ensuring equality of access
• Favourable, better-than-market interest rates
• Pay-back terms that allow graduates up to two years to find work before beginning repayment.

Please visit the  Erasmus+ Master Degree Loans website  for more information.

• PGT Excellence Scholarship

The University of Glasgow has a total of 20 PGT Excellence Scholarships available to UK students entering any of the University’s Colleges.

• Climate Leadership Scholarships

Cop26 was held in Glasgow from 31 st October – 12 th November 2021 and the University of Glasgow recognises the importance of universities in tackling the climate emergency. Glasgow is part of the newly formed  Cop26 Universities Network , a growing group of over 80 universities working together to promote a zero-carbon future. Alongside vital research being carried out by our academics, Glasgow recognises that urgent action is needed on our campuses, and we aim to be carbon neutral by 2030.  We believe that the climate emergency can only be addressed by implementing long-term sustainability policies and our Green Glasgow strategy details our action plan for the next decade.

In recognition of the vital need for action to combat the climate emergency the University of Glasgow is excited to launch our Climate Leadership Scholarships. We have 20 scholarships available to UK students entering any of our Colleges on a PGT programme which engages with the climate emergency.

As a world-changing research-led University we are committed to supporting the next generation of researchers working across disciplines to address the climate emergency.

• DAAD-University of Glasgow 1-year Master’s grant

The University of Glasgow will offer a full tuition waiver to those students that successfully apply and are nominated by DAAD to the University. DAAD offers a monthly stipend of EUR 1,100 (for the academic year 2024/2025) and travel bursary of EUR 250.00 as well as health, accident, and personal liability insurance coverage in addition to the full tuition fee waiver from the University of Glasgow.

Wichtige Hinweise zu DAAD-Stipendien - DAAD (general info on DAAD tuition fee reimbursement)

Current list of tuition reduction / waiving offers (not including U Glasgow yet) : Stipendien für ein Masterstudium im Ausland - DAAD - Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

• Colfuturo Fundacion para el Futuro de Colombia

The University of Glasgow offer discounts to all successful Fundacion para el Futuro de Colombia (Colfuturo) scholars who enrol at the University of Glasgow to complete a postgraduate programme.

• Chevening Scholarship

Chevening Scholarships are the UK government's global scholarship programme, funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and partner organisations. The scholarships are awarded to outstanding scholars with leadership potential. Awards are typically for a one year Master’s degree at universities across the UK. There are over 50,000 Chevening Alumni around the world who together comprise an influential and highly regarded global network.

For further information, please refer to the  Chevening website .

• Commonwealth Scholarship Commission Schemes

Commonwealth Scholarships enable talented and motivated individuals to gain the knowledge and skills required for sustainable development, and are offered to citizens from low and middle income Commonwealth countries. The majority of Scholarships are funded by the UK  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO ),  with the aim of contributing to the UK’s international development aims and wider overseas interests, supporting excellence in UK higher education, and sustaining the principles of the Commonwealth.

• Vice Chancellor EU Award

The University of Glasgow continues to be committed to ensuring a strong relationship with our existing and future EU students, and supporting EU talent to make their home at the University of Glasgow.  

We appreciate the challenging financial implications that have arisen for our European applicants, and are therefore delighted to offer the Vice Chancellor EU Award to highly qualified new incoming EU students starting a postgraduate taught Masters programme in any discipline for Academic Session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a tuition fee discount.  This discount cannot be combined with another University scholarship.

Applicants that graduated from the University of Glasgow or completed a Study Abroad year, Exchange programme or International Summer School at the University of Glasgow, are eligible for the Alumni discount and this can be combined with the Vice Chancellor EU Award.

• EU Welcome Award

We appreciate the challenging financial implications that have arisen for our European applicants, and are therefore delighted to offer the EU Welcome Award to new incoming EU students starting a postgraduate taught Masters programme for Academic Session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a £5,000 tuition fee discount.  This discount cannot be combined with another University scholarship.

Applicants that graduated from the University of Glasgow or completed a Study Abroad year, Exchange programme or International Summer School at the University of Glasgow, are eligible for the Alumni discount and this can be combined with the EU Welcome Award.

• University of Glasgow African Excellence Award

The University of Glasgow African Excellence Award aims to support high achieving students from across Africa in their journey to become Future World Changers.  We are looking for students who wish to undertake Masters level study, to further develop their knowledge and skills, in order to positively contribute to their community in the future.  

The University is offering up to 15 scholarships for International students from Africa, starting a 1 year postgraduate taught Masters programme, in any discipline for academic session 2024/25.  The scholarship is a full tuition fee waiver.  

• University of Glasgow African Partners Award

The University of Glasgow African Partners Awards aims to support high achieving students from across Africa in their journey to become Future World Changers.  We are looking for students who wish to undertake Masters level study, to further develop their knowledge and skills, in order to positively contribute to their community in the future.  The scholarship is exclusively for students, alumni and staff of the University partners across Africa:  African Partners List 2024 .

The University is offering up to 5 scholarships for International students from Africa, starting a 1 year postgraduate taught Masters programme, in any discipline for academic session 2023/24.  The scholarship is a full tuition fee waiver.  

Applicants much hold an offer of a place for a postgraduate taught one year Masters programme for September 2024 intake (offer is not needed to apply but applicants will require an offer to be considered for interview, and should take programme application timelines into consideration as detailed on programme webpages)

• Emerging Asia Award

The University of Glasgow is proud to introduce an exciting new award designed to support students from a selection of underrepresented 'frontier and developing' Asian countries . 

The University of Glasgow is offering 8 scholarships for highly qualified international students from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Students must be starting a one-year postgraduate taught masters programme, in any discipline, for the academic session 2024/25. The scholarship is a full tuition fee waiver with stipend for one year that can not be combined with any other scholarships. 

• University of Glasgow International Leadership Scholarship

The University of Glasgow has several International Leadership Scholarships available to International students starting a postgraduate taught Masters programme in any discipline for Academic Session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a tuition fees discount.

• University of Glasgow Caribbean Partners Award

The University of Glasgow Caribbean Partners Awards aims to support high achieving students from our partner The University of the West Indies in their journey to become Future World Changers.  We are looking for students who wish to undertake Masters level study, to further develop their knowledge and skills, in order to positively contribute to their community in the future.  The scholarship is exclusively for students, alumni and staff of The University of the West Indies.  

The University is offering up to 5 scholarships for students, starting a 1 year postgraduate taught Masters programme, in any discipline for academic session 2024/25.  The scholarship is a full tuition fee waiver.  

Those who apply must hold an offer of a place for a postgraduate taught one year Masters programme for September 2024 intake (offer is not needed to apply but applicants will require an offer to be considered for interview, and should take programme application timelines into consideration as detailed on programme webpages);

• University of Glasgow Caribbean Excellence Award

The University of Glasgow Caribbean Excellence Award aims to support high achieving students from across the Caribbean in their journey to become Future World Changers.  We are looking for students who wish to undertake Masters level study, to further develop their knowledge and skills, in order to positively contribute to their community in the future.  

The University is offering up to 5 scholarships for International students from the Caribbean, starting a 1 year postgraduate taught Masters programme, in any discipline for academic session 2024/25.  The scholarship is a full tuition fee waiver.  

• CONICyT (La Comsion Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica de Chile)

The University of Glasgow offers a 25% discount to all successful CONICyT scholars who enrol at the University of Glasgow to complete a postgraduate programme.

• University of Glasgow Chancellor's Award

The University of Glasgow has 40 Chancellors Award Scholarships available to students from low and middle income countries, starting a 1 year postgraduate taught Masters programme in any discipline, in academic session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a tuition fee discount.

• India Merit Award

The University of Glasgow is proud to announce a new India Merit award for 2024 entry to acknowledge highly qualified Indian postgraduate taught offer holders. The scholarship is awarded as a £5,000 tuition fee discount. This discount cannot be combined with another University scholarship.

• University of Glasgow Chancellor's Award (Nigeria)

The University of Glasgow has 10 Chancellors Award Scholarships available to Nigerian students starting a postgraduate taught Masters programme in any discipline in academic session 2024-25. The scholarship is awarded as a tuition fee discount.

• CONACyT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia) / FUNED Agreement

CONACYT offers a non-refundable scholarship, a monthly stipend and medical insurance of an approximate total of $20,000 USD (in the case of the UK, no medical insurance grant is given since students are already covered by the National Health System) The University of Glasgow offer a 30% discount to all successful CONACyT scholars who enrol at the University of Glasgow to complete a postgraduate programme.

• Postgraduate Student Loan (Scotland and EU)

Eligible full-time and part-time students, undertaking an eligible postgraduate course, can apply for a tuition fee loan up to a maximum of £7,000 towards their course. Eligible full-time postgraduate students can apply for a living-cost loan of up to £4,500.  

This support extends to online Masters or Postgraduate Diplomas, and not to the online Postgraduate Certificate courses.

For more information visit the SAAS website .

• Postgraduate Tuition Fee Loans England only (PTFL)

If you’re an English student looking to study a taught Masters programme in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan. Students from England are able to apply for a non-means tested   Postgraduate Master’s Loan  of up to £11,570   to help with course fees and living costs. You have to  repay your Postgraduate Master’s Loan  at the same time as any other student loans you have. You’ll be charged interest from the day you get the first payment.

If you’re studying by distance learning, you can also apply.

• Alumni Discount

In response to the current unprecedented economic climate, the University is offering a 20% discount on all Postgraduate Research and full Postgraduate Taught Masters programmes to its alumni, commencing study in Academic session 2024/25. This includes University of Glasgow graduates and those who have completed a Study Abroad programme, International Summer School programme or the Erasmus Programme at the University of Glasgow. The discount applies to all full-time, part-time and online programmes. This discount can be awarded alongside most University scholarships.

• Postgraduate Loans for Welsh Students

If you are a Welsh student looking to study a postgraduate programme* in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan in exactly the same way as you would for a Welsh University.

* does not apply to Erasmus Mundus programmes

Postgraduate Master's Finance

If you’re starting a full-time or part-time Postgraduate Master’s course (taught or research based) from 1 August 2019, you can apply for Postgraduate Master's Finance and receive up to £17,000 as a combination of grant and loan:

• a maximum grant of £6,885 and loan of £10,115 if your household income is £18,370 and below
• a grant of £1,000 and loan of £16,000 if your household income is not taken into account or is above £59,200.

For more information visit  Student Finance Wales

Postgraduate Doctoral Loan

If you’re starting a full-time or part-time postgraduate Doctoral course (such as a PhD) from 1 August 2019 you can apply for a Postgraduate Doctoral Loan of up to £25,700.

• Postgraduate Access Scholarship

The University of Glasgow is pleased to be offering Postgraduate Access Scholarships to support Home students who could face financial difficulties in taking up their place to study at the University. Applications are particularly welcomed from applicants who met any of our widening participation criteria , or equivalent, at undergraduate level. The value of each scholarship is £4,000 and they are for students undertaking a one or two year Taught Masters programme. For two year Taught Masters programmes, the scholarship is available in year one only.

• Postgraduate Student Loan (NI)

If you are a Northern Irish student looking to study a taught Masters programme* in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan in exactly the same way as you would for a University in Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish students are able to apply for non-means-tested tuition fee loans of up to £5,500, to help with the costs of funding.

For more information visit  www.studentfinanceni.co.uk/types-of-finance/postgraduate  .

• Sanctuary Scholarships

The University of Glasgow is offering up to 20 Sanctuary Scholarships for applicants to the University, who have been forced to travel to the UK for humanitarian reasons and are facing challenges in progressing onto Higher Education. The scholarship is open to prospective undergraduate and postgraduate taught students at the University of Glasgow applying for entry in September 2024/25. Please note that you must have applied to the University before submitting an application for this scholarship. The scholarship will meet the cost of tuition fees for the duration of your programme, for applicants who are unable to access mainstream funding through Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) or Student Finance . The Sanctuary Scholarship also provides a £5,000 per year stipend, to assist with study costs. In addition, if the eligibility criteria for university accommodation is met, this will also be provided for the duration of your degree, if required. For more information on the accommodation criteria, please see the  Accommodation Services section  on the website.

Undergraduate students with refugee status (or equivalent) and access to funding, are eligible to apply for the scholarship and would receive the £5,000 stipend towards study costs only, if successful.

Postgraduate Taught Masters students with refugee status (or equivalent) and access to funding, are eligible to apply for the scholarship and would receive the £5,000 stipend towards study costs and a partial tuition fee waiver, to cover any shortfall not met by your Postgraduate Masters tuition fee loan.

• The Clan Gregor Society Prize

The Clan Gregor Society is offering an award to new entrants to the University of Glasgow who descend from Clan Gregor. Prospective students will be asked to submit an application highlighting areas of consideration such as academic excellence and financial need. The award is open to both Undergraduate and Postgraduate applicants for 2024 entry.

The scholarships above are specific to this programme. For more funding opportunities search the scholarships database

Entry requirements

Entry requirements for postgraduate taught programmes are a 2.1 Honours degree or equivalent qualification (for example, GPA 3.0 or above) in a relevant subject unless otherwise specified.

We also require:

• A sample of written work, about 3,000 words in length. This can be a previous piece of work from an undergraduate degree. The work should be written in English. The content does not have to cover a topic related to this specific programme, but the sample should show the potential to engage successfully with postgraduate-level literary studies through demonstrating analytical ability and knowledge of appropriate scholarly methods and conventions.
• a short statement of around 500 words outlining your interest in the programme.
• at least one academic reference.

English language requirements

For applicants whose first language is not English, the University sets a minimum English Language proficiency level.

International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic module (not General Training)

• 7.0 with no subtests under 7.0
• Tests must have been taken within 2 years 5 months of start date. Applicants must meet the overall and subtest requirements using a single test.

Common equivalent English language qualifications

Toefl (ibt, my best or athome).

• 94; with Reading 24; Listening 24; Speaking 23; Writing 27
• Tests must have been taken within 2 years 5 months of start date. Applicants must meet the overall and subtest requirements , this includes TOEFL mybest.

Pearsons PTE Academic

• 66 with no subtest less than: Listening 66;Reading 68; Speaking 65; Writing 82

Cambridge Proficiency in English (CPE) and Cambridge Advanced English (CAE)

• 185 overall, no subtest less than 185

Oxford English Test

• Oxford ELLT 8
• R&L: OIDI level no less than 8 with Reading: 27-28 and Listening: 20
• W&S: OIDI level no less than 8.

Trinity College Tests

Integrated Skills in English II & III & IV: ISEII Pass with Pass in all sub-tests.

University of Glasgow Pre-sessional courses

Tests are accepted for 2 years following date of successful completion.

Alternatives to English Language qualification

• students must have studied for a minimum of 2 years at Undergraduate level, or 9 months at Master's level, and must have complete their degree in that majority-English speaking country and within the last 6 years
• students must have completed their final two years study in that majority-English speaking country and within the last 6 years

For international students, the Home Office has confirmed that the University can choose to use these tests to make its own assessment of English language ability for visa applications to degree level programmes. The University is also able to accept UKVI approved Secure English Language Tests (SELT) but we do not require a specific UKVI SELT for degree level programmes. We therefore still accept any of the English tests listed for admission to this programme.

For further information about English language requirements, please contact the Recruitment and International Office using our  enquiry form

International students

We are proud of our diverse University community which attracts students and staff from over 140 different countries.

• Find out more about entry requirements and other country-specific information
• International student support & visas
• This one-year masters programme is eligible for a new, streamlined visa application process: find out more

How to apply

To apply for a postgraduate taught degree you must apply online. We cannot accept applications any other way.

Please check you meet the Entry requirements for this programme before you begin your application.

As part of your online application, you also need to submit the following supporting documents:

• A copy (or copies) of your official degree certificate(s) (if you have already completed your degree)
• A copy (or copies) of your official academic transcript(s), showing full details of subjects studied and grades/marks obtained
• Official English translations of the certificate(s) and transcript(s)
• One reference letter on headed paper
• Evidence of your English language ability (if your first language is not English)
• Any additional documents required for this programme (see Entry requirements for this programme)
• A copy of the photo page of your passport (Non-EU students only)

You have 42 days to submit your application once you begin the process.

You may save and return to your application as many times as you wish to update information, complete sections or upload supporting documents such as your final transcript or your language test.

For more information about submitting documents or other topics related to applying to a postgraduate taught programme, see  how to apply for a postgraduate taught degree

Guidance notes for using the online application

These notes are intended to help you complete the online application form accurately; they are also available within the help section of the online application form. 

If you experience any difficulties accessing the online application, see  Application System Help .

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Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic

Philophantast: a speculative fiction and philosophy conference cfp.

A free hybrid conference for postgraduate students and early career researchers to be held on June 05 and 06 2024 at the University of Glasgow, supported by Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic.

Deadline for Submissions: April 19 2024

Contact Email: [email protected]

Call for Papers: Speculative fiction and media encompass multiple genres and modes that, like philosophy, make us question the possible and impossible. Speculative creations provide tools to delve into philosophical questions, such as exploring the nature of identity and approaching the ineffable, in addition to speaking truth to power and empowering marginalised voices. This hybrid conference on speculative media and philosophy, sponsored by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, seeks to showcase how speculative fiction and media can create and express philosophical insights. Speculative media has the capacity to incentivise scholars, critics, creators, and wider audiences to embrace and reflect on philosophical perspectives beyond the academic context, thus bridging the interdisciplinary gap between philosophy and the media we create, consume, study, and enjoy. Rather than considering philosophy as the abstract, systematic analysis of existence, knowledge, and reason with little to no correlation with our everyday lives, we wish to highlight the proximity of philosophy in praxis and theory through speculative media.

We invite submissions focusing on any genre or subgenre of speculative fiction, including but not limited to afrofuturism, alternate history, fantasy, the fantastic, horror, the gothic, utopia, dystopia, and science fiction. We also encourage submissions that focus on media such as film, games, comics and graphic novels, music, theatre, and television, as well as literature. Likewise, we welcome proposals from all philosophical perspectives and branches. For example, papers may address continental, analytical and indigenous philosophies and philosophical traditions; queer, non-western, post-colonial or anticolonial philosophical theory; branches such as aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and political philosophy; as well as ontological, phenomenological, and theological insights on or developed by speculative media.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers from postgraduate students and early career scholars. We also welcome panels and roundtables with a minimum of 3 and maximum of 4 presenters, and proposals for workshops. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The analysis of speculative literature and media through philosophical lenses • Speculative literature and media acting as thought experiments for philosophical ideas • Imagination and philosophy • Speculative philosophy and speculative literature and media • Philosophical discourses developed by speculative literature and media • Speculative fiction as an inclusive philosophical practice

Previous examples of studies that encompass both speculative media and philosophy include Marxist thought in Fantastika, imagining alternative worlds in speculative fiction, Neoplatonic thought in J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary production, studies on the abject in horror writing and cinema, and the fictionalisation of philosophers in literature and games.

Please submit an abstract (around 300 words), a short bio (maximum 150 words), and state if you wish to present in person or online to [email protected] with the subject line ‘Abstract Submission’ by April 19 2024. Only applications from graduate students and early career researchers will be considered for this conference. We are particularly keen to highlight the contributions of underrepresented voices within speculative media and/or philosophy at this conference, and will prioritise contributions that demonstrate in abstract and/or bio that they align with this goal. If you have any questions, please contact the committee at [email protected]

GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds – Keynote Bios and Reading Suggestions

Event registration will be available soon!  The Programme will be coming soon.  Paper Speaker Bios can be found here . Workshops and Roundtables can be found  here .  Workshop registration opens on May 6.

This document is updated as needed. All times listed are BST, British Summer Time

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Please find below our keynote speakers for this year’s GIFCon and a committee-created suggested reading list.

professor Emily Selove

Title: “Translation as Conjuration: Conversations with a 13th-Century Sorcerer”

Wednesday May 15, 13:30 – 14:30

Emily Selove (PhD 2012, UCLA) is an associate professor in Medieval Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Exeter. She is also the convener of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism. Her most recent publication is a short monograph for the Cambridge Elements Series:  The Donkey King: Asinine Symbology in Ancient and Medieval Magic . She was the PI of a Leverhulme-funded research project, “A Sorcerer’s Handbook,” (2019-2022) which will create an edition and translation of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Sakkākī’s (d. 1229) magic handbook, Kitāb al-Shāmil wa-baḥr al-kāmil ( The Book of the Complete ). Her early research focused on the figure of the uninvited guest (or “party-crasher”) in medieval Arabic literature, and especially on the 11th-century work  Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim . Her translation of another 11th-century book of party-crashing is titled  Selections from the Art of Party-Crashing in Medieval Iraq .  She also co-authored a textbook to introduce beginning students to the city of medieval Baghdad,  Baghdad at the Centre of a World: 8th-13th Century ,  and has created a collection of cartoons titled   Popeye and Curly: 120 Days in Medieval Baghdad  to accompany this textbook.

Suggested Reading List by committee member Grace Worm:

• Explore Professor Selove’s 13th century sorcerer on her blog here . There are amazing visuals and interesting research as well a collection of her publications and presentations.
• Her 2020 article “Magic as Poetry, Poetry as Magic: A Fragment of Arabic Spells” is available on Muse if you have access through an institution! This article weaves discussions of magic, poetry, language, theology, and translations.
• Professor Selove’s book Baghdad at the Centre of a World, 8th-13th Century: An Introductory Textbook is a fascinating exploration of historic cultural productions happening in Baghdad during this time and the significant impact these productions had on the formation of Europe.
• And Professor Selove’s newest published novel The Donkey King: Asinine Symbology in Ancient and Medieval Magic (Elements in Magic) , besides having an amazing title, this book is an extremely interesting examination of methods for contacting jinn in 13th century Arabic grimoires. She interrogates symbols of donkeys in summoning jinn (hence the title) and makes connections between history, cultural, magic, demons, theology, the occult, humor, literature, and artistic symbols in fascinating ways.

dr C. J. Cooke

Title: “Writing Creatures and Worlds”

Thursday May 16, 15:00- 16:00

C. J. Cooke, also known as Carolyn Jess-Cooke, is an award-winning poet and novelist published in 23 languages. Her works is often categorised as feminist gothic with fantasy and supernatural elements, and two TV adaptations of her books are currently in development, with a third novel being developed as a feature film. Cooke is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Her most recent book is  A Haunting in the Arctic , which was an Indigo Best Book of 2023.

Suggested Reading List by committee member Will Sherwood:

• C.J. Cooke’s critically-acclaimed Gothic novels are a excellent starting point. Although each novel is self-contained, I would highly recommend reading them in publication order as it allows you to follow how Cooke’s thoughts evolve on the interactions between the genre, motherhood and femininity, and trauma. Each book also includes an ‘Author’s Note’ at the end where Cooke reflects on the book’s inspiration, writing process, and themes. Start with The Nesting before moving onto The Lighthouse Witches, The Ghost Woods, and finish with A Haunting in the Arctic.
• Recently, Cooke was interviewed by Quills & Chills ( link here ) where she discussed her earliest writing memories, what brought her to the Gothic genre, and what attracted her about the themes that connect her four Gothic novels.
• Before publishing her novels and poetry, Cooke established an influential position in the Film studies, exploring the portrayal and adaptation of Shakespeare on Film and the critical value of Film Sequels.
• Besides her Gothic novels, Cooke has also published four novels and three poetry collections. We Have To Leave The Earth is a poetry collection split into three parts. Its interlocking concerns with the environment, family, and identity are harnessed to explore the virtues and flaws of human activity and how our actions find their consequences in the people and landscape around us.

Title: “Worlds inside Worlds, or, Conjuring Pasts”

Friday May 17, 12:30 – 13:30

Zen Cho writes fantasy and romance. Her newest novel,  The Friend Zone Experiment , is a contemporary romance set among London’s East and Southeast Asian community. Zen is a winner of the Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Awards and the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, as well as a finalist for the World Fantasy, Ignyte, Lambda, Locus and Astounding Awards. She was born and raised in Malaysia, resides in the UK, and lives in a notional space between the two.

Suggested Reading List by committee member Georgina Gale:

• Zen Cho reflects on her stories, career and the publishing world in her blog posts here . Her posts range from candid thoughts on the challenges of writing a novel , to discussing her experiences as a POC writing fantasy .
• One of Cho’s most recent novels, Black Water Siste r , was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2022. Jessamyn Teoh is a jobless, broke, closeted lesbian moving back to Malaysia with her family. But she soon finds herself pulled into a world of gods, spirits, and family secrets after hearing the voice of her grandmother’s ghost.
• If you prefer shorter fiction, read Cho’s ‘If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again’ , which won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2019. This fantastic story centres on an imugi repeatedly striving to defy the laws of heaven and become a dragon.
• Already enjoyed all Cho’s own works? Why not try Kelly Link’s The Book of Love . Cho describes this novel as “Pure enchantment—a tale of love, death, magic and teenagers being teenagers, rich with fairy strangeness and told in sentences like jewels strung on a chain”.
• Another novel praised by Cho, Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess is inspired by the myth of Chang’e, the moon goddess. “A stirring romantic fantasy set in a richly realised world inspired by Chinese mythology” (to cite Cho), it is a reimagining of one of the most famous Chinese Gods.

GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds – Workshop and Roundtable Speaker Bios

Event registration will be coming soon!  The Programme can be found will be coming soon.  Keynotes and Reading Suggestions can be found here .  Paper Speaker Bios can be found here .

Workshop registration opens on May 6.

Please find the bios for speakers appearing in Workshops and Roundtables during GIFCon 2024.

All workshops take place on Thursday May 16

Epics and emporiums – a cozy storytelling game, frankie bradley.

This cozy storytelling game has players collaboratively constructing a fantasy town, filling it with unique characters. Players, embodying shopkeepers, experience daily life in a quiet town on the verge of excitement. Each shop is unique, selling anything imaginable. Together, players shape characters, map the town, and choose an upcoming event—fair, pilgrimage, or natural disaster! Writing from their shopkeeper’s perspective, players imagine a day in town until it’s time to pass their story for someone else to take control. This workshop nurtures creativity and collaboration, providing writers a chance to have fun in a low-stakes narrative.

Bio: Frankie Bradley is a PhD researcher in the School of Arts & Humanities at Ulster University. They are currently working on projects involving decolonization in speculative fiction and exploring how identities are impacted by imperialist culture norms. With over a decade’s experience in the book industry, they have a variety of skills and are always willing to pick up new ones.

Creating World Connected Characters

Lily m. frenette.

In the essay “Beyond the Human,” So & Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd write that “[r]elationships between entities inform and create who we are, and we orient ourselves in the cosmos and in our local places by relating to others.” Fantasy worlds are filled with wonders of nature beyond anything in our reality: sentient rivers, animals who grant magical favors, trees that can travel. It can be a struggle to write characters who feel truly connected with these alien settings. Using theories on queer and ecological identities, we will craft characters whose connection to the natural world helps ground them in fantastical places.

Bio: Lily M. Frenette grew up in Minnesota, raised by the woods and waters. They write from the intersection of nature, magic, art, and community. Lily has an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She founded Alba Writing Club and lives with her cat familiar, Outlaw. Find them on Instagram @journalingirl.

Conjuring Politics: World-making as Pedagogy in the Social Sciences

Maha rafi atal.

Fantasy enables us to transpose, and therefore reimagine, political dynamics in our real world. This is not only because fantastic creatures “function as recognizable stand-ins” for real ones, but also because real-world political groupings are themselves “imagined communities” based on collective world-making. This workshop explores world-making as a tool of political pedagogy, including role-play re-imaginings of international summits, games that simulate the workings of capitalism, and assessments in which students film, sing or otherwise create political fantasies of their own. Facilitators will present evidence from their own teaching, before leading participants in designing new world-making pedagogy of their own.

Bio: Maha Rafi Atal is a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and a scholar of corporate power, and draws on fictional imaginings of the corporation–political economy’s own fantastical monster–in her work. She teaches courses on the popular culture and the global economy. In her teaching, she uses role-play simulations of real-world events and exercises in which students create fictional worlds of their own to explore political ideas. She will facilitate this workshop alongside colleagues in Politics who also use world-making as a pedagogic tool to teach contemporary social science, including Alister Wedderburn, Michael Toomey and Jonathan Parker.

Roundtables

Opening roundtable, wednesday may 15.

Researchers discuss their research in the context of this year’s GIFCon theme “Conjuring Creatures and Worlds”.

From the Call for Papers:   How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?  

Roundtable Participants:

Chris Lynch-Becher is in his final year as a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, studying worldbuilding in Terry Pratchett’s  Discworld  series. He was the co-founder of the inaugural GIFCON, all the way back in 2017, and co-runs  Puck’s Players , a fantasy theatre group! In 2021 he achieved an Associate Fellowship of Recognising Excellence in Teaching. Look out for his chapter on maps in Bloomsbury’s upcoming book on Power and Society in Terry Pratchett’s  Discworld .

Dr Madeline Potter is an early career teaching and research fellow in 19th-century literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores the intersections between Gothic literature and theology, with a focus on monstrosity. Her first academic monograph, Theological Monsters: Religion and Irish Gothic is forthcoming with University of Wales Press.

Conjuring Creatures (and Worlds) in YA Fantastika

Friday may 17.

Researchers discuss Conjuring Creatures (and Worlds) in Young Adult Fantastika.

Description coming soon!

Alkisti Kallinikou bio coming soon!

Shiqing Zhang bio coming soon!

GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds – Paper Speaker Bios

Event registration is coming soon!  The Programme will be coming soon.  Keynotes and Reading Suggestions can be found here . Workshops and Roundtables information can be found here .  Workshop registration opens on May 6.

Panelists in alphabetical order (by first name):

• Alice Langley  
• Amy Richmond 
• Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui 
• Anisha Das  
• Anna Milon & Tom Emanuel 
• Astrid R. Abildgaard  

Barbora Kaplánková

• Bettina C. Burger 
• Brynnah Runyan  
• Caroline Hannum 
• Catherine Hall  
• Chloe T. Power 
• Corinne Matthews  
• Daniel Jordan 
• David Muiños García  
• Dulmi Wickremasinghe  
• Elliott Greene 
• Emilie Morscheck  
• Eva McLean  
• Fiona Reid  
• Frankie Bradley 
• Gao Weiming  
• Grace Rhyne 
• Hannah Frances Roux 
• Hannah Mimiec  
• Hollie Willis 
• Inêz Vaz 
• Iria Seijas-Pérez 
• Kristine Larsen  
• Madeline Wahl 
• Manon Hakem-Lemaire 
• María Alonso Alonso 
• Maria Damkjær 
• Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad  
• Meg Horridge  
• Mercury Natis 
• Michael Quinn 
• Nathaniel Harrington  
• Nick Stember 
• Ning Lee 
• Olivia Scarr 
• Rachel Cairns  
• Rachel Harrison 
• Rebecca Gault 
• Rebecca Lloyd  
• Rebecca Pearce 
• Scarlett Butchers 
• Şevval Tufan  
• Siravich Khurat 
• Supriya Baijal 
• Tam Moules  
• Tara West 
• Vaibhav Dwivedi 
• Vincent Pritchard 
• Xiana Vázquez Bouzó  
• Zainab Wahab  
• Zoe Wible  
• Zvonimir Prtenjača 

Alice Langley

Abstract: Transformation as conjuration: the power of the post-menopausal woman. This paper applies a new framework to my research surrounding women who turn to stone: by using the lens of maiden/mother/crone, I distinguish between three women’s reasons and methods of conjuration, transforming themselves and creating a stone replacement. The three texts I am interrogating are Lucy Woods’ short story “Countless Stones,” Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale , and another short story, “The Stone Woman,” by A. S. Byatt. Rita, from Woods’ piece, undergoes a resigned and pragmatic transformation to standing stone on a Cornish clifftop. Considered a modern maiden (single, childless, unmarried), Rita’s slip into stone is quiet and unassuming. Hermione conjures a stone statue as her replacement in The Winter’s Tale to demonstrate her grief at the loss of her children and resistance to her husband’s false accusations of adultery. I argue that Hermione’s death, evidenced by her character’s appearance as a ghost, and reincarnation, represent the symbolic death and reincarnation of women’s transition to motherhood and newly altered state. Ines in A. S. Byatt’s short story represents the ‘crone’ element of the tripartite; here considered to be a post-menopausal woman (as fitting neither other category), Ines’ transformation is richly empowered – she travels to Iceland, ‘a primal chaos of ice, stone silt, black sand, gold mud’ (Byatt), to complete her corporeal transformation. I argue that, by comparing these women and their forms of transformation, we can see a spectrum of empowerment – from Rita’s slow, sad petrification, to Ines’ joyous and free merge with the Icelandic landscape. The figure most closely synonymous with the maiden lacks confidence and agency, whereas Ines’ transformation is redolent with it. The contemporary reclaiming of mature womanhood in books like Hags by Victoria Smith to Hagitude by Sharon Blackie, will be used to reinforce the argument that the post-menopausal woman conjures her own power.

Bio: Alice is a doctoral researcher in the Fantasy and Creative Writing departments at the University of Glasgow. She is in the process of editing her first novel as part of her PhD, which uses magical realism to examine the physical manifestation of grief for people who have experienced miscarriage. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, and she has given papers at UK and international conferences. Her writing includes work for theatre and a computer game which is currently in production. She works as a freelance editor and can be found on Instagram @alicelangleywriter.

Amy Richmond

Abstract: “It makes us feel a little like God”: Conjuring Delusions and Creation in Mona Awad’s Bunny “We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn’t we?” Mona Awad’s critically acclaimed 2019 horror Bunny encapsulates the psychological breakdown of scholarship student Samantha and her obsession with a group of her peers called the Bunnies. The book carefully depicts Samantha’s descent into madness and the collective delusions of the girls, in a literarily conscious blurring of fantasy and reality. On reading, it is deliberately unclear what Samantha has imagined and what she has experienced – dead/alive friends, heads exploding, the Frankenstein-building of boys, combining of identities, and bunny hunting. As a satirical critique of academia, it is inherently interested in intertextuality – with references to Frankenstein , Beowulf , and the creation of ideas. This paper seeks to interrogate how Bunny explores the concept of creation looking at three main angles. Firstly, it will explore the intertextual allusions throughout the novel and how it explores literary creation in Samantha’s creative writing workshops. This will lead into a critique of the Frankenstein acts in the novel – the explicit acts of asexual but eroticised creation that Samantha and the Bunnies enact in the Smut Salon as they build erotic male bodies. And finally it will then discuss the destructive deconstruction of what is created as Samantha descends into a madness and is unable to differentiate between what is real and what is fantasy. In its discussions of Bunny , this paper aims to explore the differences between delusion and fantasy, and question to what extent reality is of importance in discussing Bunny .

Bio: Amy Richmond (she/they) is an early-career academic who holds an MA(hons) in English from the University of Aberdeen and an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. Specialising in contemporary fantastic fiction, their research interests include spatial theory, queer theory, Young Adult fiction, and body politics. She has presented at GIFCon, Exclamat!on Conference, and serves on the Editorial Board of Mapping the Impossible and currently works as a Journals Commissioning Editor at Emerald Publishing.

Ane B. Ruiz- Lejarcegui

Abstract: Enacting the Nonhuman: A.I. Consciousness and Text-Reader Interaction in Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit

From human-made artificial intelligence to extraterrestrial entities with distributed hive minds, representations of nonhuman Others have long proliferated in speculative fiction. Depicting the wholly alien or that which requires reconfiguring any preconceived notions or boundaries, however, is not an easy feat, which is why authors strive to find a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar, so as not to entirely alienate the reader. In this paper, I argue that SF centred on nonhuman sentience may help defamiliarise human consciousness and reconceptualise hegemonic and anthropocentric binary systems of meaning (and oppression), thus endorsing posthumanist sensibilities. For this, I follow Caracciolo’s explanation of the text-reader interaction and non-materialist definition of consciousness, understanding it not as an object which can be linguistically depicted, but experienced by the reader, as an active and embodied enactment (2012). As case study, I analyse the conscious awakening (Matthews, 2023) of the A.I. protagonist in Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), Sidra, a Lovelace-model spaceship A.I. now installed in an illegal anthropomorphic ‘body kit.’ Through Sidra’s character, Chambers portrays the interplay between the known and the indescribable in which the fantastic thrives: a familiar embodiment, in this case, a human body, inhabited by an unfamiliar consciousness used to different sensory and communication systems. To understand how she achieves this, I look at narrative stylistics, such as deliberate omissions to prompt reader interaction and the decentring of anthropocentric meaning-making, following Sidra’s exploration of her own identity, her confrontation of self-image issues, feelings of dysphoria and dissociation, and her final attainment of agency and self-acceptance. Thus, since experiential sharing between reader and character seems to entail perspective-taking and empathy (Caracciolo, 2020), I contend that examples such as Sidra’s allow us to enact and be open to different, equally valid non-anthropocentric alternatives to experiencing existence.

Bio: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui is a PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Spain and a predoctoral researcher in the research group REWEST: Research in Western American Literature and Culture. She has been granted a scholarship by the Basque Government to carry out her thesis on hybrid identities, power asymmetries and othering in contemporary science fictional narrative discourse. She has also done extensive research on H.G. Wells’ early works for her BA and MA dissertations, and her current interests include Posthumanism, Space Opera, Contemporary American Fiction, Hybridity, Cognitive Narratology and Cultural Studies.

Abstract: Legends of the land: Assam’s mythical creatures and their ecological resonance.

Assam, a state nestled in the northeastern part of India, stands as a repository of cultural diversity and vibrant oral traditions. The legends and myths have evolved into stories that shape the collective consciousness of the community. Folklore of Assam is full of tales of mythical creatures woven into the region’s identity, both in folktales and urban legends, often assigned specific spaces where they reside, rule, or haunt. Among these tales, two intriguing mythical entities, the Bamboo Ghost which is said to haunt the bamboo groves, and Jalnarayan, a spirit linked with the element of water hold significant cultural and symbolic value. Despite their ethereal nature, they seemed to be bound by an invisible tether to their designated spaces, their existence is linked to the very essence of the element of nature with which they are associated. This confinement underscores their intrinsic connection to the land, implying a symbiotic relationship between the mythical realm, the physical landscape, and the oral history of Assam. Behind their formidable façade these creatures, often lurking in the shadows, seem to mask the true intent of their protective nature. Their dichotomy as both assailants and guardians sheds light on the complex relationship between the people of the land and their environment. This paper aims to explore the multifaceted roles played by these mythical creatures, examining their existence in oral and urban legends as both menacing entities and protectors, while also drawing parallels to the social, historical, and ecological struggles of the communities. By examining these entities within the context of cultural continuity, this paper seeks to shed light on the intricate relationship between folklore and community narratives.

Bio: A native of Assam, Anisha Das holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and Film Studies. Her master’s dissertation explored the intertextuality of fairy tales, with a particular focus on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth . For her dissertation on film studies, she investigated Indian animation films with anthropomorphic characters. She has transitioned into the role of creative strategist in digital advertising, serving for the past three years. Her academic journey and professional experience position her at the intersection of literature, film, and digital media.

Anna Milon & Tom Emanuel

Abstract: Conjured Presence: Spiritual Experiences in Fantasy Spaces

Going back to Huizinga (1938), play theorists have recognized the similarity between games and rituals as activities inscribed within a magic circle that imbues actions, words, and states of consciousness with significance “apart from” their everyday meaning (cf. Wagner 2012). Within these magic circles, player-participants may have meaningful spiritual experiences and encounter what they understand to be genuine spiritual presences (Laycock 2015). This raises a question: what is the nature of such experiences and encounters when they take place in magic circles which have been conjured for ostensibly non-spiritual purposes, such as fan rituals or live-action roleplaying (LARP) games?

Enyaliȅ (Quenya: remembrance) is a fan gathering which takes place at J.R.R. Tolkien’s grave in Oxford on or around the 2 September anniversary of his death. Featuring readings from his writings, the laying of commemorative wreaths, and ritual song, Enyaliȅ reproduces Cherry’s (2010) fourfold structure of Christian worship. Whereas Christian liturgy facilitates encounter with the Christian God, however, Enyaliȅ is explicitly nonreligious. Tolkien is honored but not worshiped, and the story-world invoked is understood as fiction not gospel per se.

Conversely, magical rituals performed at Curious Pastimes LARP are diegetically religious, framed as encounters with various divine powers, but do not reproduce any sacred rite of the primary world. Performed by approximately two to a dozen people, such rituals can be observed by any number of LARPers, and include features of various world belief systems from Christianity to modern paganism that their participants find evocative.

Despite their differences, we propose both Enyaliȅ and rituals at Curious Pastimes can facilitate meaningful spiritual experiences in their participants that transcend beyond the frame of either fan community or role-playing game. It is our aim to explore the nature and role of such experiences in fantasy spaces of fandom and LARP.

Bio: Dr. Anna Milon is a longstanding GIFCon lurker who should really have done a PhD at Glasgow, but was seduced by the south coast and Exeter instead. Her thesis on the pagan Horned God as an environmental figure in fantasy fiction includes a case study of Live Action Role-Play storytelling alongside more conventional narratives. She is currently looking for ways to study the overlap between role-play and alternative spiritual movements in more detail. Anna lives in Hampshire with her paladin fiancé, a medium-sized child, and an orange cat.

The Rev. Tom Emanuel is a Congregationalist minister and PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. His research explores the reception of The Lord of the Rings among nonreligious fans and is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) doctoral partnership with the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). His work on Tolkien and theology has appeared in publications such as Mythlore , Mallorn , and The Journal of Tolkien Research . Tom lives in Glasgow with his spouse and two elven-fair children whom he is already inducting into the ‘deplorable cultus’ of Tolkien fandom.

Astrid Roesen Abildgaard

Abstract: Conjuring a World of Women – And a Solution to our Climate Struggles? Human-nature relationships in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland In her lost-world fantasy Herland (1915), the American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) conjures up a utopian world of the same name. It is a world without men, a world founded on miracle births and centred around motherhood, a world that is ideal for women. Much of the research on Herland has understandably focused on the ways it reflects Gilman’s proto-feminism or – in another vein – her interest in eugenics. However, in recent years, critics have turned to the role of the natural world in Gilman’s feminism. Building on this ecological turn in Gilman studies, this paper will explore the human-nature relationship depicted in Herland and contextualize it in terms of the environmental concerns of both early 20th-century America and the Anthropocene. I will argue that in the act of shaping a world around motherhood, Gilman also conjures up a world of ecological improvement and that Gilman presents us with a “good Anthropocene” where human influence on nature is omnipresent yet balanced. I will also show how, with this vision for nature, Gilman situates herself in a larger but largely forgotten tradition of utopian fiction written by American women in the 19th and early 20th century. And like these women, Gilman offers us a vision of modes of being with nature that – though fantastical – can be instructive today.

Bio: Astrid Roesen Abildgaard (she/her) completed her Masters degree in English and History at the University of Copenhagen in 2022 and has since worked as an upper secondary school teacher. Her interests lie in women’s history and women’s writing, preferably in combination. She hopes to expand her dissertation on American utopianism in a PhD project that seeks to recover and re-examine American women’s utopian fiction from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Abstract: Children of Miyazaki: Travellers into the Unseen Hayao Miyazaki can be safely considered among the most important creators of children’s fantasy movies of the last few decades. His work is characterized by complex explorations of family, growing up and the world as seen through the eyes of a child. It is not, however, only a matter of depicting naivety or innocence – Miyazaki endows his child characters specifically with the power to access the layers of reality unavailable to adults. The main focus of this paper is a comparative analysis of how the children in Miyazaki’s films interact with the alternative worlds and their many forms of the unseen drawn from animism and shintoism, and oscillating between the fantastic and the mythological/mystical. These interactions bring complexity into Miyazaki‘s portrayal of children – they are faced with serious issues and obstacles, many of which just happen to exist beyond the scope of adult perception. In this paper I focus specifically on the child protagonists of My Neighbor Totoro , Kiki’s Delivery Service , Spirited Away and Ponyo , and the cooperation of stylistic elements and dialogue in conveying their specific experiences. My main goal is to characterize these children’s experiences of the films’ respective unique versions of the unseen (new levels of reality, magic, creatures, deities) through analysis of selected scenes, and in the end describe how those contribute to the overall manner in which Miyazaki presents us a child’s view of the world, both “ours” and “other”.

Bio: Barbora Kaplánková (1994) is a student of the PhD programme Theory and History of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czechia. In her dissertation she focuses on depiction of masculinity and femininity in contemporary fantasy film franchises. She is interested in fantasy and animation, and her currently developing interest is the Czechoslovak fairy tale film. She teaches classes on animation theory and on fantasy as a genre, and published chapters on animation in Metamorphoses of Imagination: The Feature Films of Jan Švankmajer (2020, ed. Luboš Ptáček) and Czech Cinema: Situation in 2018 (2020, ed. Petr Bilík).

Dr. Bettina Charlotte Burger

Abstract: Their Primitive Superstition vs. Our Scientific and Enlightened Magic – Magic Systems in T. L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series

‘Magic system’ is the term for the collective rules and limitations of magic in a fantasy text, which may be well defined and quasi-scientific or vague and mysterious. According to Christopher Mahon on clarkesworld, “[m]aking magic into a kind of science, similar to modern views on thermodynamics or astronomy, risks creating a kind of causal closure that causes each fantasy world to turn into a mirror-image of our world, complete with historical and philosophical parallels to the Age of Enlightenment and its aftermath” (n.p.). T. L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series fully leans into the “historical and philosophical parallels to the Age of Enlightenment” (n.p.) feared by Mahon and uses them to great effect. The Edinburgh Nights series juxtaposes a hard magic system, based on the very principles of the Scottish Enlightenment – part of a magic library is literally named after David Hume – with the protagonist’s ‘traditional’ knowledge, taught by her Zimbabwean grandmother. Ropa uses music to communicate with ghosts and ghouls, a talent that is looked down upon by the established magic users of her world. It is a ghost’s plea for help, however, that leads her right into the centre of Scottish magic, the Library of the Dead, where she is introduced to the ‘enlightened and scientific’ magic of the establishment as well as to more prejudices towards her own magic. Ropa is enamoured with the more structured magic she now has access to, but Huchu takes great care to show that the Enlightenment type of magic (and science) is by no means without flaw. It is ultimately always Ropa’s talents that save the day. In presenting the two magic systems side by side, Huchu manages to criticise Enlightenment thought that disparages more traditional ways of knowing without dismissing the scientific method completely, thus creating a nuanced Zimbabwean-Scottish magic system.

Bio: Bettina Charlotte Burger is a lecturer at the Heinrich-Heine University of Dusseldorf in the field of English Studies. Their dissertation argues that fantasy literature ought to be considered as world literature in its scope and that world literary readings of individual examples of world fantasy are highly productive as well as necessary. They have co-edited a collection on Nonhuman Agencies in The Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel and have published several articles in the field of speculative fiction. Currently, they are working for a project that intends to establish an Australian Studies Online Masters Programme.

Brynnah Runyan

Abstract: Alienation of A-Spec Identities: Sexuality, Romantic Love, and What it Means to Be Human Within the LGBTQ+ community, nonhuman characters frequently serve as symbolic representations of diverse identities, notably asexuality (ace) and aromantic (aro) identities (Rowan Ellis, “The Problem with…). This trend, prominent in fantasy and science fiction, is exemplified by Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation . Data, primarily expressing asexual and aromantic traits due to his nonhuman and artificial nature, once referenced an “intimate” connection with Tasha Yar, significantly influencing perceptions of his humanity (“Measure of a Man”). This paper delves into asexuality and aromanticism within nonhuman characters in sci-fi and fantasy realms. Asexuality, denoting the absence of sexual attraction (ace), and aromanticism, signifying the absence of romantic attraction (aro), depict identities often defined by what they lack, residing in a space of non-identity. These identities are frequently depicted as “other” in media portrayals. While showcasing these identities in nonhuman characters aims to provide visibility, it also runs the risk of alienating individuals within their community and species. The study explores compulsory sexuality, media portrayal, and the intricacies of these identities, aiming to address why alloromanticism and allosexuality (the presence of romantic and sexual attraction) are consistently linked to essential humanity. Its goal is to illustrate how nonhuman ace/aro characters challenge this narrative, questioning the use of the absence of sexual or romantic attraction to define non-humanity.

Bio: Brynnah Runyan (she/her) is a Master’s student in her final year at the University of Colorado Denver. Her primary areas of study are popular literature, adventure novels, and revenge narratives, all displayed in her undergraduate honors thesis “‘Wait and Hope’: Faith, Hope, and Redemption in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo .” Though she’s taken some time away from creative writing, Brynnah also published a sci-fi work, Henryk. Brynnah lives with her nesting partner John-Michael and her dog Stanley. She loves to take in the fresh mountain air when she hasn’t sequestered herself inside to research her current hyperfixation.

Caroline Hannum

Abstract: Girls Against Gods: Divinity as the Female Hero’s Antagonist, a Metaphor for Patriarchal Control

The contemporary fantasy novels The Poppy War , City of Dusk , and Kingdom of Ash all written by women authors since 2017, feature complicated and morally gray female protagonists who struggle against God or Gods. This paper will argue that these novels deploy divinity as a metaphor for patriarchal control, allowing their protagonist to assert their own will against a supposedly absolute power. Authors R.F Kuang, Tara Sim, and Sarah J. Maas use fantasy’s ability of conjuration to create worlds in which magic is derived from beings of seemingly unlimited power. Living in these realities, each hero must come to terms with the fact that her power, even as it provides a sense of authority and control, is not her own, and in fact limits her autonomy. The plots and authorship of the three novels involve women of diverse and varied backgrounds negotiating their vexed relationship to patriarchal power. In 2022 Taylor Driggers proposed a theory of the relationship between fantasy and religion in his book, Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature ; he argued for fantasy’s ability to articulate queer and feminist spiritualities and theological imaginaries that challenge the power structures of Western theology. This analysis will extend Driggers’ claims for the subversive capacities of contemporary fantasy, arguing that they contest patriarchy as well as theology. It develops a feminist account of the relationships between female heroes and her god(s), and situates that account in relation to the work of scholars including Janine Jobling and Douglass E. Cowan, among others. Overall, this analysis seeks to contribute to a larger conversation in how fantasy can be used as a space in which women can deconstruct and demarginalize their identities in a patriarchal system. It asks the question: in a genre in which anything can be conjured, why did these women create worlds in which their heroes are not autonomous but beholden to a power outside of themselves?

Bio: Caroline Hannum is a second-year MA student in the English Department at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on contemporary fantasy novels authored by women.

Catherine Hall

Abstract: Dwarvish Point of View?: Neo-Khuzdul, Fanfiction, and the Construction of an Alternative Middle-earth

In “A Secret Vice,” Tolkien argues that language and mythology are “coeval and congenital” and that “language construction will breed a mythology” (“A Secret Vice” 2016: 24). Khuzdul, the secret language of the Dwarves, is much less developed than the tongues of the Elves; only a few fragments of Khuzdul are found in Tolkien’s writings, and the Neo-Khuzdul constructed by David Salo for Peter Jackson’s adaptations is also limited. Dwarves are also a marginalized and othered group in Middle-earth, and, founding their interpretations on statements of characters biased against Dwarves, Peter Jackson’s adaptations and some critical literature recreate the biases against them. In response, many fanworks challenge misconceptions of Tolkien’s Dwarves. One important fan-created resource on Tolkien’s Dwarves, recognized as an authoritative source within the Tolkien fandom, is The Dwarrow Scholar’s Neo-Khuzdul Library. This resource, often cited by fanfiction authors, contains dictionaries, translation tools, and, significantly, articles on Dwarvish culture and history, illustrating the interconnectedness of language and mythology underlined by Tolkien. This paper will explore the uses of The Dwarrow Scholar’s Neo-Khuzdul in a diverse range of fanworks in comparison with the use of the language in Tolkien’s writings and Peter Jackson’s adaptations—on which a large body of fanfiction is based—and suggest that this fan-constructed language conjures an alternative portrait of Middle-earth from the previously marginalized perspective of Dwarves. Moreover, the incomplete portrait of the race in Tolkien’s writings leaves room for interpretation, and The Dwarrow Scholar’s dictionary aids and encourages fans to explore alternative modes of identity and being through Dwarves, conjuring a more inclusive and diverse portrait of Middle-earth. We see, then, how the construction of an invented language, even if used within an already existing secondary world, can create an alternative mythology.

Bio: Catherine Hall earned her BA in English Literature at McGill University in 2022 and is currently completing an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. She has been an executive editor for the student-run, online Science Fiction and Fantasy review ImaginAtlas since 2020, and some of her work has been published in Mythlore . Her research interests include Old English heroic poetry, Tolkien’s medieval sources, Dwarves, monstrosity, and fan culture.

Chloe T. Power

Abstract: House of the Dragon: Gender, Race and the Persistent Past

This paper proposes to analyse HBO’s House of the Dragon (2022-), the prequel to Game of Thrones (2011-2019), to highlight a significant trend in a broader corpus of contemporary televisual fantasy representations which produce, circulate and reproduce contradictory ideologies and images of gender and race. Focusing on an immersive, medievalist, fantasy world, this paper recognises long-held racial, gender-based and white-dominated prejudices within the genre. Fantasy often reaches into the past for its narratives and aesthetics and medievalism is but one aspect of this. Medievalism and the pasts’ prominence within the genre and how this has shaped certain generic conventions and aesthetics is key in understanding why images and aesthetics of a non-modern era are so widely recurrent. Adaptations are a product of their time and conditions as “we cannot isolate a text from its historical contexts of production and consumption” (Mittell 7). As a site for analysis then, House of the Dragon, can reveal cultural tensions surrounding inequality, representation, and visibility. Through a close analysis of the character Queen Alicent Hightower, this paper seeks to draw out the discourses about gender and whiteness circulating in this fantasy world. The particular medievalism GoT and now House of the Dragon produces plays a part in “framing of the Middle Ages as white space” in fantasy screen culture (Downes and Young, 221). Through maintaining generic expectations of medievalist fantasy worlds, problematic framings of race and gender arise, for example, consistent imaginings of royalty, upper classes and those in positions of power as predominantly white and male. Whiteness and “medievalist nostalgia” coalesce in this series to prioritise white bodies, while non-white bodies are repeatedly displaced or marginalised. Examining how race and gender are used to construct alternative iterations of society in televisual fantasy offers an opportunity to understand our culture.

Bio: Chloe is a third year PhD candidate in University College Dublin, who’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary fields of fantasy in television and literature, offering an inter-sectional analysis of the representation of gender, race and sexuality in the contemporary genre. Her project, The Progressive Fantastic: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Evolution of Transmedia Fantasy 2010-2021, combines analysis of fantasy novels with television adaptations, exploring the emergence of fantasy TV and the inter-medial impact of the genre’s new prominence in the market. Aside from a lifelong obsession with fantasy she is also interested in film, hiking and her dog.

Corinne Matthews

Abstract: Conjuring Consent: Magic, Power, and Patriarchy in Young Adult Fantasy Since #MeToo’s viral moment in 2017, there has been an increased public focus on both the prevalence of sexual assault and the importance of teaching young people about consent. However, while scholars like Roxanne Harde and Angela Hubler have drawn attention to sexual assault within young adult realist texts, their focus has largely been on rape and rape culture rather than consent. Similarly, while scholars like Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Leah Phillips have underscored both the potential and limitations of young adult fantasy, critical attention has not yet been paid to how consent works within the genre. However, YA fantasy has long introduced readers to questions of consent and thus plays a key role in how it functions in larger sociocultural contexts. This presentation considers how a range of YA fantasy authors (Tamora Pierce, Kristin Cashore, Malinda Lo, etc.) use the magical systems of their fantasy worlds to teach young readers about how consent should—and shouldn’t—work. While some authors keep magical and sexual consent separate and others investigate the intersections of the two, many YA authors shed light on how consent can and should work through magical allegory, especially in the face of power differentials made even more stark by the magical systems in which their characters function. Spotlighting representative titles like Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted and Cashore’s Graceling , I argue that through the imaginative world building and allegory allowed by genre fiction, these authors can escape the limitations of contemporary society, illuminate the underpinnings of larger systems of oppression, and imagine more just alternatives.

Bio: Corinne Matthews is a postdoctoral fellow in the University Writing Program at the University of Florida, where she earned a PhD in English in 2023. Her research interests include children’s and young adult literature, fantasy and speculative fiction, gender and sexuality studies, and comics and graphic novels. She also co-hosts the pop culture podcast Sex. Love. Literature .

Daniel Jordan

Abstract: Roll for profit: Exploring capitalist realism in fantasy video games Mark Fisher (2009) encapsulates his theory of capitalist realism in the phrase ‘[it is] easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. His book seeks to pin down the ideological malaise that has cloaked the world since the fall of the Soviet Union; the feeling that capitalism has conquered the political imagination and all that is left to argue is who is best place to administer the capitalist state. Looking at our literature, fantasy has imagined the end of the world numerous times – and the birth of many new ones. Though, as Fisher contends, it still struggles to think outside of a world dominated by capitalist social relations. Recreating modern power dynamics in fantasy is nothing new. Just as Helen Young (2015) asserts the difficulty of excising modern race relations from fantasy literature, capitalism has become so ingrained in our societies that it is mirrored in fiction without a second thought. Through an exploration of fantasy video games, including The Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft , this paper will discuss how games efface the ideological nature of capitalism – and reinforce it as the natural status quo. First, the paper will discuss how the mechanics of role-playing games put particular focus on neoliberal accumulation and numerical progression (Van Doorn, 2014). Second, while the games in question take great inspiration from real pre-capitalist history, they merely take these eras as an aesthetic ignoring any underlying ideology and theology. This ignores the specific social relations of each era and culture – reducing them all to a society that looks remarkably like our own. These two forces combine to assert the ‘affective regime’ of neoliberal capitalism and reinforce its ‘cultural hegemony’.

Bio: Dan (he/him) is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Glasgow, based in the Urban Studies department. His current work looks at labour movements and trade unionism in the Scottish video game industry. While his primary research interests are in labour studies and the sociology of work, he is a lifelong gamer who is fascinated by the study of games as an artform – and their political ramifications.

David Muiños García

Abstract: Motherless: Absent, Spectral, and Monstrous Motherhood in Video Games The idea of mothers as protagonists has been widely explored in film and literature while video games have remained adamantly resistant to placing them at the center of the narrative. Yet, every single patriarchal trope about motherhood, pregnancy, and femininity keeps being repeated even in today’s video game fictions. Thus, we still see the same recurring patterns where mothers are confined to the role of nurturer unless they can provide character development for the hero, at which point they acquire one of three statuses: dead, spectral, or monstrous. This paper takes a critical look at several video games where mothers are represented within the limits of such archetypes in favor of a male heroic protagonist, often a father represented as a positive example–a trend which has been sharply increasing in the last ten years in the video game industry. Prominent examples include video game sagas such as God of War, Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, and The Banner Saga. Motherhood has stayed not only underrepresented, but steadily misrepresented. Female fertility is implied to be abhorrent when not under male control; pregnancy is portrayed as a grotesque transformation of the human body, often becoming a crucial plot point in the horror genre; sexuality appears only through the lens of patriarchal pre-conceptions and unrealistic standards. Those aspects of female existence that do obtain representation are sorted into male-designed dehumanizing categories, such as those found in “pink games”. What all these issues point towards is the lack of female perspective in the representation of female gender-specific issues in video games. Therefore, this paper will shed light into the representational patterns of motherhood and pregnancy followed by male-focused game development in lieu of better-informed perspectives on female experiences.

Bio: David Muiños García (he/him) earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English Philology at the University of A Coruña, where he also earned a Master’s Degree in Advanced English Studies. He combines his research in cultural studies with his job as an English teacher. He earned a B.A. Hons in Combined Studies at the University of Worcester, UK. He also lived in the United States, where he taught Spanish at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania. He is currently working on his PhD thesis, in which he delves into representational patterns of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and fatherhood in video games.

Dulmi Wickremasinghe

Abstract: An LOTR world “for everyone”? Discussing Amazon’s interventions in Tolkien’s representation of Elvish gender aesthetics

This paper examines Elvish gender representation and aesthetics in Amazon’s Rings of Power (ROP). It argues that Amazon negatively alters Tolkien’s ambivalent representation of Elvish genders and contradicts its own efforts to create a more inclusive LOTR universe. Instead, Amazon reinforces harmful, real-world gender binaries and erases already marginalized identities from fantasy, despite making other progressive decisions (like racially diverse casting). First, the paper argues that Tolkien’s descriptions of the Elves’ biological sexes carry very strong, feminine aesthetics, such as ethereal beauty and long/beautiful hair. Thus, fanwork, and Peter Jackson’s LOTR and Hobbit films, represent male and female Elves with an aesthetic ambivalence that challenges readers’ understandings of real-world male/female binaries, and invite subversive readings of gender-fluidity in Tolkien’s Elves. The paper then demonstrates how Amazon mutes this ambivalence by representing its male Elvish characters with more rigid, 20th/21st-century gender conventions, such as short hair. To do so, the paper uses cultural studies theory, textual close readings, and media analysis. Particularly, it uses Sean Nixon’s work on “new man” aesthetics, which discusses how media constructs gender, and borrows his terminology to discuss the differences between Tolkien and Amazon’s representation of the Elves. It will also use criticism of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography to discuss how feminine aesthetics in particular help create ambivalence, alongside scholars and viewers’ responses to Amazon’s aesthetic alterations. This paper ultimately demonstrates that excluding Tolkien’s ambivalent feminine aesthetic limits the scope of ROP–especially because ROP offers no alternative, gender-diverse representations of its own. This limits viewers’ ability to interact with the conjured world, but also wrongfully suggests that LOTR is a hyper-masculine fantasy. Lastly, it perpetuates the harmful notion that gender diversity is absent in fantasy. Thus far, fans and scholars have overlooked these implications–a precedent this paper hopes to change.

Bio: Dulmi Wickremasinghe (she/her) is a Fantasy MLitt student at the University of Glasgow researching contemporary YA fantasy. Her other research interests have included skin whitening practices in literary and historical settings, and wish-fulfilment and social politics in the Middle English loathly lady tales. In her spare time, she enjoys teaching, learning to cook food from various cultures, and collecting books despite no longer having any space to store them.

Elliott Greene

Abstract: (Re)Writing Reality: Authorial Power and Narration as Conjuration in Alan Wake 2 In Remedy Entertainment’s highly acclaimed 2023 video game, Alan Wake 2 , the power of narration is central to both the plot and gameplay. Trapped in the mysterious Dark Place, troubled author, Alan Wake, must free himself by writing and rewriting a narrative of escape. The Dark Place allows Alan’s writing to change reality, both within the Dark Place and the ‘real world’. This ability for narrative to transform reality is actualised in the gameplay, merging the role of player and character, with the player testing combinations of scenes and plot elements to manifest solutions to various puzzles. Nevertheless, Alan’s efforts to escape are limited by the genre of the story, horror. Julio Cortázar’s short story “The Continuity of Parks” similarly merges the role of reader and character, relating a story in which a reader is so immersed in a tale of murder that he does not realise he has become the victim. Both of these texts question the extent of a reader and author’s power to shape narrative, while simultaneously offering a metanarrative perspective on the process of story crafting. However, while Cortázar’s short story implies the inevitable death of the reader-as-character, Alan Wake 2 offers the potential for liberation from passive immersion in a text, realised through multiple playthroughs. This paper argues that Alan Wake 2 offers a reimagining of Cortázar’s concept of the passive reader, proposed in his famous 1963 novel Hopscotch . Like Alan Wake 2 , this novel allows multiple stories to arise from repeated readings in which the role of reader and author are merged. Alan Wake 2 , as a video game, adds a further layer to the metanarrative merging of reader and author, allowing the player to actively participate in the revision of the story.

Bio: Elliott Greene is a Lecturer in Foundation Studies and early career researcher. He completed his PhD in English Literature at Edinburgh University in 2023. His thesis, (De)Constructed Binaries: Monologue and Dialogue in Contemporary Popular Fantasy, offered a narratological analysis of the way popular fantasy texts resolve the tension between binary oppositions. His most recent publications include an article in The Journal of Narrative Theory on N.K. Jemisin (2023), and a chapter in the recently published The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024).

Emilie Morscheck

Abstract: Reimagining Disability in YA Fantasy: Exploring Harper and Rhen in ‘A Curse So Dark and Lonely’

This paper considers the construction and representation of dis(ability) in fantasy young adult novels, with a specific focus on the novel A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer. It will explore how Kemmerer represents dis(ability) through the characters of Harper and Rhen, and will argue that Kemmerer’s use of a fantasy world achieves the subversion of roles for disabled characters and questions real world constructs of disability. This aligns with Webb’s view on representation that “What seems to be true, right or accurate is, generally speaking, only true, right or accurate when it fits with a particular social, historical and personal perspective.”(2009, 7). The concept of ‘disability’ has an alternative interpretation in Kemmerer’s fantasy setting. The narrative arc of A Curse So Dark and Lonely provides a unique lens through which to examine the portrayal of disability through the inclusion of a main character with cerebral palsy, a young woman named Harper. Harper comes from a version of the real world, and Rhen, the cursed prince, lives in a fantasy world. Both are considered disabled in their original worlds, but not by each other. Where Harper doesn’t view her disability as an unconquerable obstacle, Rhen’s curse is central to the novel’s conflict. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on representation in literature by unravelling the complexities of disability coding in fantasy young adult novels. Through a focused examination of A Curse So Dark and Lonely , it illuminates the potential of the fantasy genre to challenge and reshape traditional narratives surrounding disability, ultimately fostering a more inclusive and empathetic literary landscape.

Webb, J. (2009). Understanding Representation. SAGE Publications.

Bio: Emilie Morscheck, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Canberra, investigates the portrayal of autism in young adult fantasy literature. Shortlisted for the 2021 Text Prize and honoured as the inaugural recipient of the Steph Bowe Mentorship for her manuscript ‘These Cursed Waters,’ her academic pursuits intertwine her passion for writing and research. Emilie’s scholarly focus delves into the nuanced representation of autism, aiming to illuminate the intersections of identity and storytelling within the realm of young adult fantasy. Her academic journey embodies a commitment to exploring diverse narratives and advancing understanding of marginalised identities in literature.

Abstract: ‘But the flower is made of shadow:’ The ecoGothic, the Ephemeral and the Fantastic within C.J. Cooke’s The Ghost Woods C.J. Cooke writes that her novel The Ghost Woods is ‘first and foremost a gothic novel’ and this paper explores the text’s relationship with the ecoGothic. The dark forest conjured by C.J. Cooke is far from a mere a backdrop as it acts as an active participant in the narrative, blending the eerie with the ecological. Pearl Gorham arrives at Lichen Hall in 1965 – an opulent house in the middle of the woods shrouded in folklore of ghosts and fae. Pearl is one of many young women sent to Lichen Hall to give birth and this paper will address the setting, mythical creatures, fae and growing ‘fungus that creeps up the walls’ that Pearl encounters. Cooke blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, creating a narrative space where the fantastical becomes a tool for reflecting on the complexities of human experiences. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of gothic literature’s evolution, highlighting how The Ghost Woods adapts traditional motifs to comment on environmental and social issues pertinent to both its 1965 setting and the present day. This paper will draw on a range of fantasy theory and ecocritical theory as the ecoGothic and fantastical framing, serves as both an ode to gothic traditions and casts a critical lens on environmental concerns, particularly climate change, to illustrate how the gothic setting is employed to mirror contemporary anxieties about human and nature relationships.

Bio: Eva McLean completed her MLitt with distinction at the University of Glasgow focusing on ecocriticism, creative writing and visual art. Eva has presented at the University of Freiburg’s Culture at Play conference and at Once and Future Fantasies and GIFCon both hosted by the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are in the digital and environmental humanities. She earned her Global Citizen Award with the University of Mainz through an exchange programme on climate change. She volunteers with the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and illustrations of hers are published on the university blog. Eva currently works at UofG.

Abstract: Humans and robots: neuroqueer identity exploration through Dungeons and Dragons

Where we end, and a character begins can often be a fine, or even nonexistent line. In tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons, we often find ourselves conjuring creatures and characters that reflect not only who we are, but who we want (or don’t want) to be. Neurodivergent and queer people, who often lack accurate media representation (e.g. Hadjiiouannou and Saadi, 2022, Nankervis, 2022) and who feel ostracized or pushed out from typical society find themselves reaching for a place they can escape, where they can be whoever they wish with no judgement or worry. Tabletop roleplaying games can allow many of these individuals to find this escape, a cathartic space to explore their identities and create their own representation through conjuring their own characters. Within this, many neurodiverse and queer individuals find themselves reaching for one trope again and again. Robots, who are often seen as unfeeling and cold, too logical and lacking human features, seem to draw in these individuals, who are fascinated with their manner. This paper discusses the lived experiences of neuroqueer individuals who use the creation and play of robots to explore and represent their marginalized identities through the conjured world of a Dungeons and Dragons setting. How the ability to create and play a genderless character devoid of inherent sexuality, who is free from the real-world expectations of how to behave in social situations, present your emotions, and act “human” provides neuroqueer people the opportunity to unmask and experiment with identity in a judgement free zone. Thus, allowing them to explore their own identities by engaging in and practicing social situations safely and with no real-world repercussion, as well as allowing them the chance to be themselves in a world hand-created for them to thrive, rather than simply survive.

Bio: Fiona Reid has completed a Master by Research in Psychology at Abertay University and an undergraduate degree in Public Sociology. Her main research interests explore neurodiversity, sexuality, and gender, often through the lens of nerd culture and with a passion for creative research methods. Her research is often interdisciplinary, engaging with disability studies, queer studies, ludology, and social studies. She is looking to expand her research to reflect her interest in neuroqueer studies, fiction, and roleplay.

Abstract: Love and Monsters: Viewing Monster Romance Through a Queer Lens Monster Romance, while considered taboo in mainstream circles, has become a popular concept in the fantasy romance genre, with thousands of titles available that cater to every niche interest. Monsters flood the market with minotaurs ( Mail Order Minotaur by Lilith Stone, Grab the Bull by the Horns by Sam Hall), ogres ( Get In My Swamp by G. M. Fairy), and faeries of every court ( Dark Fey by Cynthia A. Morgan, The Fallen-Fey Chronicles by S. L. Gavyn) just to name a few. While many of these romances are presented as heteronormative—a cisgender woman involved with a masculine presenting creature—there is an element of queerness in the pursuit of that which has been othered by society. Monsters have had a long history of queer coding, an act that utilizes queer stereotypes to signal a monster or villain as being inherently evil. However, the monster romance seeks to subvert the idea of the monstrous as unattractive or repulsive by embracing it as a potential romantic and sexual partner. By comparing paranormal, or monstrous, romances such as the Modern Tales of Faerie by Holly Black, Duskwalker Brides by Opal Reyne, and Dragonbait by Vivian Vande Velde, we can see what queer stereotypes are in use when characterizing the female heroines and their monstrous counterparts, how these narratives compare to openly queer narratives, and how effective these romances are as stand ins for queer identity.

Gao Weiming

Abstract: Conjuring Historical Figures and Alternative History Narratives: A Study of the Japanese Fantasy Franchise Fate

The Japanese ACG (Anime, Comics and Games) subculture is now one of the most popular subcultures among the youth, reaching hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. Fantasy is one of the most enduring and enjoyed genres in Japanese ACG subculture. Under the theoretical framework of alternate history, I will examine how Japanese fantasy ACG works conjure and reinterpret real historical figures. I will analyse how different possibilities of world history are reimagined in these works and discuss the deconstruction and reconstruction of myths and history in contemporary popular cultures. Fate is an anime, manga, game, and novel franchise published by the Japanese ACG studio TYPE-MOON starting from 2004. In the fictional world in Fate, every 60 years, magicians selected by ‘the Holy Grail’ gather in the city of Fuyuki in Japan, where they conjure the ‘heroic spirits’ of historical figures, forge contracts with them, and fight each other for the Holy Grail. The historical figures conjured in the Fate franchise are often reinterpreted and are significantly different from their counterparts in real world history or mythologies. Thus, the Fate storylines recount alternative histories that are distinct from but also parodic of those of the real world. The works in the Fate franchise deconstruct the metanarratives and reconstruct the personalities of historical figures. This article will take different ACG works in the Fate franchise as examples to explore how fantasy ACG works can combine the conjuration of historical figures with gamified storytelling, allowing different historical figures from different cultural backgrounds to have cross-temporal communication. In such a manner, ACG works re-examine and discuss historical events and historical figures from diverse perspectives, and enriches the diversity of narrative possibilities of alternative history.

Keywords: Alternative History; Japanese Fantasy; ACG subculture

Bio: Gao Weiming is a postgraduate student in the Science Fiction Studies MA programme at University of Liverpool. He is also a member of the British Science Fiction Association. His main research interest is science fiction and fantasy in the era of globalisation, especially in ACG subcultres. His reviews for the American and Japanese Science Fiction ACG have been published as chapters in the books Introduction to Science Fiction and World Science Fiction Frontiers Annual 2021. He is also a research assistant at the China Science Fiction Research Center and co-edited the Chinese Academic SF Express 2022.

Grace Rhyne

Abstract: Charlotte Riddell: Literary Banshee This paper will delve into Charlotte Riddell’s use of banshees within two of her ghost stories, and how the banshee’s warning transcends the written word and transforms Riddell herself into a real banshee. In Riddell’s stories, “Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning” (1867) and “Conn Kilrea” (1899), the banshee haunts the titular characters and warns them of an imminent death, something “reserved solely for families of pure Gaelic blood” (Herbert Hore and David Mac Ritchie, 1895, pp.116). Hertford O’Donnell, and Conn Kilrea having both removed themselves from Ireland, and assimilated into British society, call forth the banshee through the death of their Irish culture. These banshees come with a two-fold warning, that of the impending death of a relative, and that of Irish culture. By introducing a spirit from Irish folklore into England, where O’Donnell and Kilrea had fully removed themselves from their homeland, Riddell not only complicates the idea of assimilation, but goes so far as to make it impossible for her characters to survive assimilation, as seen by the death of Kilrea’s brother. Victoria Margree argues that “Riddell’s usual narrative pattern is certainly unsettled by having brought the spectre of colonialism into its foreground,” but I argue this is Riddell’s intent (British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, pp. 61). It is through this use of the banshee in problematising assimilation that Riddell establishes herself as a banshee, depicting the dangers and deaths that come from abandoning one’s culture. By considering Riddell’s own relationship with assimilation—she was raised in Ireland, but moved to England as an adult—this banshee’s cry only becomes more significant, as she harnesses a folkloric mirror of herself to spread her warning of the impending death of Ireland, thus disrupting the traditional ghost story narrative, where the ghosts are purely spectres existing on the page.

Bio: Grace Rhyne (she/her) is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Warwick where she researches Victorian women’s ghost stories and the ways in which they discuss issues of mobility. Grace completed her MA at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, USA, where she wrote on Queer Temporalities and Victorian Vampires. Additionally, Grace is the founder and current President of Warwick University’s Gothic and Horror Society, and teaches seminars on Medieval and Early Modern Literature. She is the proud owner of eleven copies of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and is always on the hunt for more.

Hannah Frances Roux

Abstract: “Not the Real Orient but a Fantasy”: C.S. Lewis’s Calormen and Edith Sitwell’s Modernist Orientalism.

This paper begins with the claim that C.S. Lewis’s depiction of Calormen, in the Narnia Chronicles is undeniably “orientalist,” in the sense popularised by Edward Said (1978). Warwick Bell has recently argued that this is an uninteresting point: the use of “stock images” of the East in the construction of Calormen is, for him, a product of Lewis’s “time and place.” (232). Ball argues that Lewis was influenced by sources such as the Arabian Nights in ways that are more complicated than Said’s model suggests. (9-10). Yet he also writes that “Lewis’s ‘Orient’ was not the real Orient but a fantasy,” and belongs in a tradition of British writers fascinated by the “Romantic East.” (232-233). That Lewis’s imagined East was formed as much through his engagement with European literature as Middle Eastern seems undeniable. Shasta-Cor’s near sale into slavery echoes eighteenth-century anxieties over “white slavery” in the so-called Barbary coast; the monstrous Calormen god, Tash, suggests The Song of Roland’s Saracen religion more than real-world Islam. My paper makes a case that one of these British sources for Lewis’s orientalism is Edith Sitwell’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” a poem Lewis read and re-read throughout the 1930s and 40s. Sitwell’s poem is filled with images of a “Romantic East” and her poetry constructs the East differently from Eliot and Pound’s – modern poets to whom Lewis reacted more negatively. Reading Lewis’s Calormen in as in the same tradition as this distinctly Sitwellian modernist orientalism does not absolve him from the accusation that he reproduces the orientalist imagination of his time – quite the opposite. It is true that Lewis’s orient is “not the real Orient but a fantasy.” (Ball, 232). Yet this is no unimportant fantasy. It comes to stand for Lewis and Sitwell’s most interesting aesthetic differences from their contemporaries.

Bio: Hannah Roux is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney. Her thesis investigates C.S. Lewis’s engagements with the poetry and criticism of T.S. Eliot. Her broader interests are in the relation between the Inklings and their contemporaries in Anglo-American modernism, mid-twentieth century literature and criticism in Britain, fantasy and science fiction, and the intersections of religion and literature. She lives in the Blue Mountains, just outside Sydney, where an obligatory half-finished fantasy novel gathers (metaphorical) dust in her (digital) desk-drawer.

Hannah Mimiec

Abstract: ‘The Screaming Horrors’: Animal Advocacy and Eldritch Horror in Watership Down

Richard Adams’ 1972 novel Watership Down is often read as a piece of animal advocacy literature, emphasising human and nonhuman continuity (e.g. Raglon and Scholtmeijer, 2007). This paper’s textual analysis will focus on Captain Holly’s account of the destruction of the Sandleford Warren, a pivotal moment in the novel, in which the danger of men to the rabbits is at its most harrowing. It will argue that Adams’ description of human activity in this scene has a lot in common with the style of writing often employed by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen in their weird fiction. From the description of when the ‘air began to turn bad’ (Adams, 1972) to the ‘great silver, shining thing’ (Adams, 1972) that the men use to destroy the warren, the activities of men are always alien and horrifying to the rabbits and create the ‘atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread’ (Lovecraft, 1927) that is characteristic of the weird. Reading this scene as both a piece of animal advocacy literature and as weird fiction then opens up an interesting tension in the novel’s portrayal of its animal characters. The rabbits of Watership Down are anthropomorphised in a number of ways; they have their own language, religion, and games. At the same time, Adams uses techniques common to the weird in order to defamiliarise human activity to the reader, and transforms what might be routine work in the countryside to an apocalyptic event that parallels the waking of Cthulhu. If the fear of humans are to the rabbits what the ‘racial-nightmare’ (Haraway, 2015) of Cthulhu is to Lovecraft, then this points to a radical decentering of the human within Watership Down and the need for animal advocacy texts to look beyond anthropocentric appeals to humans.

Bio: Hannah Mimiec is a part-time PhD student and part-time lecturer in law at the University of Dundee, currently researching narratives of policing in weird fiction. They hold an LLB and an MLitt from the University of Glasgow, where they were part of the 2022/23 Fantasy MLitt cohort. Specialising in cultural legal studies; their research interests include the intersection of law with weird and horror fiction, children’s literature, and tabletop games.

Hollie Willis

Abstract: ‘The Locals Bite Back’: A Defence of the Tuunbaq and the Use of Fantasy in The Terror When assessing the success and/or failure of a historical film/tv adaptation, the prevailing factor is that of historical accuracy. This is the case in HistoryBuffs’ review of the 2018 AMC adaptation of Dan Simmons’ book The Terror , in which he rebukes the inclusion of the Tuunbaq, a monstrous spirit who hunts the crew of the Franklin Expedition. However, in my presentation I will come to the defence of the Tuunbaq, specifically how this supernatural creature helps to entrench an anti-colonial retrospective of the Franklin expedition and the role of the Inuit people involved. This will involve a critical analysis of how the Tuunbaq is depicted and used as a metaphor for indigenous agency in the TV show, the Inuit mythology surrounding it, and a brief comparison with the creature in the original Simmons text. I will contextualise my analysis using written sources from the true story of the Franklin Expedition and how Inuit people were perceived by the British, such as Charles Dickens’ racially stereotypical depiction of Inuit eyewitnesses in his response to John Rae’s evidence of cannibalism. Rather than the out-of-place ‘man-bear-pig’ described by HistoryBuffs, I argue that the Tuunbaq embodies an act of conjuration, both as a mythological spirit and as a fantasy storytelling device that aids our ability to deconstruct the past and the equally conjured nature of historical narratives. (223 words)

Bio: Hollie Willis is a second-year PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis focuses on the representation of funerary rites in contemporary fantasy literature in the context of the death positivity movement. She has shared her early research at conferences such as the CRSF, Finncon, and the annual Tolkien Society seminar, and is involved in organising the 2024 GIFCon conference. Her research interests, aside from death, include cannibalism, 19th century arctic exploration, feminist gothic, and all things macabre.

Abstract: Monster Girls Turning Darkness to Light: Subversive Uses of Monstrosity in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Nimona Monsters, as well as the notions of good and evil they help establish, have always been a core element of any fantasy narrative, and are especially crucial in those works meant for children, as they serve as an introduction to said concepts. Much like the villain, the monster has long been associated with difference and otherness, incarnating all that is bad and evil, many times appearing in fantasy stories, merely for “placing yet another obstacle in the way of the hero’s quest.” (Clute and Grant 654) However, recent trends in storytelling for younger audiences have been trying to challenge some of these outdated notions of monstrosity and villainy, as well as the harmful ideals they help perpetuate, by placing traditional monsters in new contexts. In this sense, I want to look at two examples of contemporary fantasy animation distributed as kids’ content— She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020) and Nimona (2023)—and explore how these works (re)think and (re)present monstrous figures and the relationship they establish with typical indicators of otherness such as queerness, disability, ethnicity, or neurodivergence. Through an analysis of characters like Nimona, Ballister, Scorpia, Entrapta, Catra, Double Trouble, and others, I argue that in these works, the usage of monstrosity associated with certain qualities as an indication of innate evil and moral depravity is not only harshly criticized but utterly dismantled and masterfully subverted. By looking at the ways these characters that embody monstrous features are used in the narratives, I intend to show how in these works, traditional indicators of monstrosity are repurposed to showcase and expose difference in a positive light, transmitting the idea that being Other, does not necessarily make you bad, and that true evil lies in condemning and marginalizing someone simply because they are different.

Bio: Inês Vaz is a Portuguese PhD student and aspiring researcher who reconciles her personal interests with academic work, so she has an excuse to buy more books. In her PhD thesis she will deal with representations of hags and crones in works of fantasy animation of the last century, focusing primarily on notions of monstrosity and otherness in the show The Owl House (2020-2023). In previous research she has explored themes such as the monomyth, literature and other media, adaptation, animation, and children’s and YA fiction. Through her work she hopes to help further fantasy studies within Portuguese academia.

Iria Seijas-Pérez

Abstract: Analysing the Witch Figure in Irish YA Fiction: Deirdre Sullivan’s Perfectly Preventable Deaths (2019) and Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke (2019) In Ireland, the history of witchcraft differs slightly from British, continental European, and North American mainstream histories on the perception, treatment, and persecution of witches. Accusations and prosecutions for witchcraft did not happen in Ireland until the mid-seventeenth century, and only a total of four witchcraft trials have been recorded in early modern Ireland (Sneddon 2012). Witches were certainly perceived as evil creatures; however, it was fairies that were more often blamed for fateful events and were consequently more feared. Regarding the label ‘witch’ more generally, this has been used by society to mark women as other, to portray them as dangerous, aggressive, and violent, and to control them (Ricks 2020). The term ‘witch’ referred almost exclusively to women, and accusations of witchcraft attacked women who transgressed patriarchal norms (Miller 2018). Nevertheless, nowadays the word ‘witch’ has been reclaimed, becoming a word of power that marks a refusal to comply with the norms and expectations of patriarchal society (Ricks 2020). The representation of witches in literature has varied through the years, from the crone to the hag to the teenage witch. Witches have been depicted as evil women or magic healers who have a special connection with nature, among other characterisations. In this paper, I particularly focus on the representation of witches in Irish YA fiction. I will look particularly at Deirdre Sullivan’s Perfectly Preventable Deaths (2019) and Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke (2019), which Patricia Kennon has defined as “works of Irish YA ‘witcherature’” (137). My aim here is to analyse the depiction of witches and witchcraft that appear in these novels, in order to demonstrate how these are similar to or differ from traditional perceptions of the witch figure, and how the witch characters defy patriarchal norms in a variety of forms.

Bio: Iria Seijas-Pérez is a predoctoral researcher at the University of Vigo, under a predoctoral grant from the Galician Government (Xunta de Galicia). She is a member of Feminario: Feminisms and Resistances, within the established Research Group “BiFeGa: Literary and Cultural Studies, Translation and Interpretation” (Ref. ED431C-2020/04), and a member of the research project “Communitas/Immunitas: relational ontologies in Atlantic anglophone cultures of the 21st century” PID2022-136904NB-I00 MCIN/AEI. Her PhD thesis studies the representation of female LGBTQ+ adolescents in young adult literature written in English by Irish women. Her research interests include Irish literature and culture, LGBTQ+ and feminist studies, and young adult literature.

Kristine Larsen

Abstract: “Even those who are different can survive”: Dragons, Speciesism, and Procreation in Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher and its Adaptations The rich multimedia Secondary World of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series includes short stories, novels, a Polish single-season tv series, and an ongoing Netflix series (with spinoffs). Sapkowski’s world openly embraces and subverts the literary sources upon which it draws, especially Polish folklore. This paper focuses on the short story “The Bounds of Reason” (adapted in the Polish and Netflix series), based on the Polish legend of the dragon of Wawel Hill. Here the Witcher (monster hunter) Geralt replaces the heroic dragon-slaying cobbler of the original tradition. However, Geralt will not harm dragons, which Sapkowski describes as “noble creatures” and “rational beings.” While Jonathan Evans explains that Old English and Old Norse tales “emphasize differences between the human and the monstrous”, Sapkowski’s tale does the opposite, blurring the standard lines between the monster and the hero, and between species, especially in the shapeshifting golden dragon Villentretenmerth. The dragon-hunters (mainly humans) are painted as the truly monstrous, while the members of ‘Othered’ groups (all mutants who suffer from infertility) – Witchers, Sorceresses, and Dragons – are more heroic. The world of the Witchers more broadly suffers under a hegemony of self-proclaimed human exceptionalism which has led to extreme speciesism (including genocide) against Elves, Dragons, and even the Witchers themselves. I argue that Sapkowski’s golden dragon acts as a mirror through which characters are forced to recognize their own potential for destruction, for as Geralt explains people “like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.” Sapkowski’s tale also explores larger themes of human destruction of the natural world, including the role of reduced procreation in dooming a species to extinction. But I argue that Sapkowski’s story is ultimately not without hope, for as the dragon explains, through empathy and compassion “Even those who are different can survive.”

Bio: Dr. Kristine Larsen has been an astronomy professor at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including sexism and science; science and popular culture (especially science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien); and the history of science. She is the author of the books Stephen Hawking: A Biography , Cosmology 101 , The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century , Particle Panic! , and most recently Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters (McFarland & Company).

Madeline Wahl

Abstract: Who Can Speak Characters Into Existence?: Stuttering, Fluency, and Conjuring Characters in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart

Stuttering, according to the National Institute of Health in the UK, is “is a speech disorder characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks.” In Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart , main character Mo has the unique ability to have characters appear in real life when reading out loud from a book. This paper will explore conjuring characters in Funke’s story, specifically the difference between fluent reader Mo, nicknamed “Silvertongue,” and disfluent reader, Darius. When Mo reads characters out loud fluently, the characters appear in a perfect corporeal form. However, when Darius reads out loud, he stutters which allows for characters who appear in reality to have something wrong with them including disfigurement. Through close reading and contextual analysis of Inkheart , I will compare and contrast how Mo conjures characters versus how Darius conjures characters. I will look at not only how Darius and Mo conjure characters, but also in the perception of other characters on their conjuring skill. Mo is perceived to be eloquent and the expert conjurer, while Darius is viewed as useless because he has a speech impediment. This paper will acknowledge that conjuring characters by speaking out loud is an incredible talent. However, Darius reading characters out has a direct result in characters being deformed. Thus, the fantasy world Funke constructed reinforces the stigma associated with stuttering that exists in the “real” world. This paper will also focus on accessible worldbuilding in a fantasy context. Finally, it will be acknowledged that peer perception of disability awareness is crucial especially in creating fictional fantasy worlds.

Bio: Madeline Wahl (she/her) recently completed her MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Previously, she has held editorial positions at Reader’s Digest, HuffPost, and Golf Channel. She was a speaker at the Australian Speak Easy Association’s online 2020 conference and has previously written about stuttering for The Stuttering Foundation. She holds a BA in Advertising/Public Relations with a minor in Psychology and a minor in English-Writing from the University of Central Florida. She is working on her first novel in YA Fantasy and her first nonfiction book proposal on millennial caregiving.

Manon Hakem-Lemaire

Abstract: The Fantasy of Alterity in Richard Marsh’s Imperial Gothic Novel The Beetle (1897) Although it initially outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) has been largely forgotten. The novel was out of print from 1960 to 2004, and a 1919 silent film adaptation is now considered lost. The creature here conjured is a gender-fluid, shape-shifting beetle-human come from Egypt to seek revenge on a Member of Parliament who killed a woman during the British protectorate of Egypt twenty years earlier, in the 1880s. The beetle infiltrates houses, mesmerises characters into acting on its behalf, assaults them, and kidnaps a British woman for sacrifice by the Cult of Isis. Encounters with the beetle – alternately referred to as “Mussulmanic”, “the Arab”, “the scarab” – are told in the rhetoric of counter-invasion of the nation, but also of the body, which reinforces the confusion about its sexual identity. In addition, the novel’s form rejects linearity and conventional storytelling through the use of four narrators whose accounts vary in genre, from what Patrick Brantlinger has termed the “imperial gothic” to near-theatrical comedy and a final section that borrows heavily from the detective genre, notwithstanding the final twist in the fantastic mode. In this paper, I propose to study the creature of the beetle as a perturbator of racial, social, and sexual norms in the imperial context of the fin de siècle. The creature’s travel from Egypt to Britain, its undefined ontology, and fluid sexuality, push against past and present definitions of fin-de-siècle imperialism and literary conventions. Flaubert’s ironical definition of an orientalist as “homme qui a beaucoup voyagé” (“a man who has travelled extensively”) appears particularly tongue-in-cheek in this context: an amateur, or even a scholar of “oriental” culture, need not have travelled to conjure up a fantasy of the Orient – Marsh had not – and the imaginary traveller’s gender need not have been defined.

Bio: Manon Hakem-Lemaire is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Since writing her MA thesis “Pragmatic Diversion: The Fantastic as Alternative Realism in Guy de Maupassant and Horacio Quiroga” (University of Saint Andrews and University of Guelph, 2017), she has continued to explore nineteenth-century “alternative” realisms in the context of travel writing, imperialism, and perceptions of alterity. While writing her dissertation, she teaches world literature at Baruch College and works as a fellow in Writing-Across-the-Curriculum pedagogy at Queensborough Community College.

María Alonso Alonso

Abstract: Conjuring the Posthuman: An Intersectional Overview in Irish and Galician Literatures Posthumanism is a barely explored avenue of research in Irish and Galician Studies, two interconnected literary traditions which have been usually analysed from a comparative perspective. Despite the growing number of literary works published in recent years that illustrate the increasing social debates which are directly connected to this line of thought, reflections on the way posthumanism is conjured in Irish and Galician literatures are still scarce and much needed. Issues related to abject citizenship, figures of exclusion, disposable subjects, among others, appear in works by contemporary Irish and Galician authors to identify synergies between human and nonhuman animals, the environment, machines and modern technologies, among others. The framework of Posthuman Studies, with its interrogation of dominant configurations of the human with a broader scope that incorporates the nonhuman in its most innovative form, allows us to approach the incommensurable challenges posed by the Anthropocene while reflecting on alternative forms of agency. On the one hand, Irish authors such as Mary Costello or C. L. Bennett incorporate pressing reflections about the possibilities and limitations of human language for representation not only of other humans but also nonhuman animals. On the other, Galician authors such as Yolanda Zúñiga or María Reimóndez explore through their fictions further materialisations of the posthuman through a number of uncanny characters that reconsider preestablished categories of gender, identity, biology or technology. The aim of this paper is to explore posthuman intersections in contemporary Irish and Galician literatures in order to incorporate those categories which have been overlooked by classic humanism. More specifically, this paper aims to identify the aesthetic challenges involved in the conjuring of the posthuman, that is, the shifts it provokes at the level of language and representation since this aesthetic dimension of the texts to be examined has not been tackled by criticism yet.

Bio: María Alonso Alonso is Assistant Professor at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Previously, she worked as a teaching and research fellow at the Universidade de Vigo (2008-2014 and 2018-2020), University of Edinburgh (2017-2018), University of St Andrews (2016-2017) and Instituto Ramón Piñeiro (2015-2016). She is currently one of the directors of the research project “Posthuman Intersections in Irish and Galician Literatures” (PID2022-136251NB-I00, MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033/FEDER), together with Dr Manuela Palacios González. Apart from her research interests in posthumanism, migration, gender and ecocriticism in literature, she is also a published author of fiction and poetry in the Galician language.

Maria Damkjær

Abstract: Conjuring worlds through book culture A central element of world-building is the design of a material world. Books, which are handled, lost, found, read, or destroyed, are both a shorthand for a fantasy world’s material culture, but also a metafictional nod to the reality of the reader. Fantasy authors tend to like books, and expect their readers to also have positive feelings about books. But in many fantasy worlds, especially those inspired by medieval European history, books are invoked as scarcity objects, or worse, as forgotten and decaying. This paper asks how book culture within modern epic fantasy is used to conjure secondary worlds where knowledge is threatened. I will discuss a set of modern epic fantasy series, and ask: what do books represent? What other forms of record-keeping and knowledge preservation exist in the secondary world, and why? What are the limitations of different kinds of knowledge transfer, and how does that play into the narrative? Contemporary fantasy authors, I posit, are both fascinated by texts, and also troubled by their limited chance of survival over the very long periods that the genre tends to sketch. Deep time is hostile to book knowledge, and it is the loss of knowledge that poses the greatest challenges to fantasy realms so obsessed with the distant past. Contemporary fantasy is occupied by the assumption that knowledge must be sought where it is hidden; that book learning is marginalised and dismissed; that there is a scarcity of both books and knowledge more generally; but that the ‘hidden truth’ might not, in the end, be trustworthy. In short, transmission of information is threatened; and as several of these stories are also meditations on climate catastrophe — especially Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Jemisin’s The Broken Earth — these anxieties conjure a feeling of transience and threat.

Bio: Maria Damkjær is an Associate Professor (short-term) at the University of Copenhagen. She earned her PhD from King’s College London in 2013. Maria’s work focuses on material texts in the nineteenth century and questions of genre, narrative fiction, and the history of reading. Her forthcoming book, Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth Century Magazines , is about malleable storytelling in Victorian periodicals. From her starting point in Book History, she has branched out to be interested in reading and book culture within contemporary epic fantasy. (Last name pronunciation: ‘Dam-care’)

Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad

Abstract: When Nature Speaks: Fictional A.I. as Folkloric Creatures of the Technological Age

Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, the environments we surround ourselves with have changed considerably, and as forests make way for concrete jungles one may assume that the creatures once rumoured to live under every root and rock has left us – unless perhaps, we may have brought them back. In this presentation I will compare features of early fictional A.I. to figures such as faerie folk and mythological gods, suggesting that these figures appeal to a similar storytelling instinct to anthropomorphize our surrounding environment and structure our understanding of natural forces, creating an evolving archetype between them. But, as our organic environment is replaced with an artificial one, so in turn must its inhabitants change. I will primarily use examples of A.I. narratives of the late 1960s, when a boom in early A.I. fiction spawned many of the most iconic and impactful narratives in the genre to this day. • “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967) by Harlan Ellison • “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (1969) by Brian Aldiss • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), by Arthur C. Clarke • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick I hypothesize that major unprecedented advancements of this time, such as the moon landing, enhanced an impression that the limits of technology may be unknowable or even unlimited, leading to a keen awareness of an incoming technological singularity and pushing speculative A.I. further towards the fantastic. If, in line with Clarke’s laws, any A.I. sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from the fantastic, it could take any form that old tales told, challenging a feeling of safety seen since the Age of Reason and reintroducing to realism what was previously dismissed, opening the door for both the wonders and horrors of fantasy.

Bio: Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MLitt in Fantasy Literature in 2020 and has since continued writing as an independent academic. Her work includes a contribution to the Mapping the Impossible journal, and recently a chapter contribution in Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier , published with Vernon Press. She has a long-lasting interest in fictional representations of technology and works with using the theories and methods developed for fantastic literature to further understand the characteristics of science fiction. She is currently working towards a PhD on the topic of fictional representations of A.I.

Meg Horridge

Abstract: Conjuring Utopia: How Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed Builds an Imperfect World

Utopian fiction appears to imply the presentation of a ‘perfect’ world, but when this is the case, the utopian novel can often feel more like a long-winded description of an imagined world than an embodied exploration of it. The utopia, rather than being a fantastical world created for the purpose of telling a story, thus instead becomes a thought experiment, conceived of abstractly rather than in full colour. As such, the utopia must inevitably be conjured in a way that facilitates conflict and change, which cannot occur in a truly perfect world. Thus, more recent utopias have tended to introduce some imperfection to their fictional worlds—not merely points on which readers may not agree, but elements that are intentionally presented as the drawbacks or unfulfilled promises of the utopia. Do these imperfections contradict the promise of utopian fiction, or are they a necessary compromise to facilitate story? And with this in mind, how can utopian worlds be constructed in a way that retains their utopian character? Considering these dilemmas, I will explore the ways in which Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed appears to combine utopian and dystopian conventions to create her “ambiguous utopia”. Despite its prominent flaws, Le Guin manages to maintain the sense that Anarres, the anarchist moon of the novel, may still be a utopia worth saving. By assessing the presentation of Anarres as flawed yet still aspirational, and the ways in which the novel attempts to convince the reader of this, I will illustrate how utopian worlds can be conjured in a way that acknowledges and utilises their necessary imperfections.

Bio: Meg Horridge (they/them) is a sci-fi and speculative fiction writer, currently working toward a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Their research and creative work explore the need for utopian fiction in an increasingly dystopian world, and how the genre may be innovated upon and updated to suit the twenty-first century.

Mercury Natis

Abstract: Letting the Beastly Beast Go: Navigating compulsory heterosexuality through King Pellinore and the Questing Beast in The Once and Future King In his Arthurian Epic The Once and Future King , T. H. White tackled complex adult issues and concerns through a sometimes thinly veiled guise of children’s fantasy. Compared to the inner workings of Guinevere and Lancelot’s emotional lives, the tale of King Pellinore and his adventures with the Questing Beast seem to be a childish aside, interspersed within the narrative. This paper will investigate how T. H. White, a semi-closeted and often morose homosexual, uses the Questing Beast and Pellinore’s relationship with Sir Grummore to question the compulsory heterosexuality that is required of boys when they become men. Through the mode of juvenile fantasy, sometimes in direct contrast to the rest of the text, White presents the Questing Beast (gendered female) as a requirement that Pellinore, a childish adult, struggles to pursue. He is pleasantly distracted from his quest by being a guest in Grummore’s home, with dialogue that barely disguises the intimacy of shared beds and homosocial spaces. Pellinore and Grummore’s juvenile homosociality is an antidote to the quest for the Beast. As the epic grows up, from The Sword in the Stone to The Queen of Air and Darkness, the metaphor of the Questing Beast as the compulsory heterosexual contract evolves into a metaphor for returning to childhood out of the bonds of real marriage, back into the innocence of homosocial bonds and juvenile adventure. The Questing Beast in The Sword and the Stone is a required burden that can be avoided through homosocial intimacy. The Questing Beast in The Queen of Air and Darkness then changes, as she inserts childlike frivolity and adventure through being a cheeky and seductive female playmate, more akin to T. H. White’s beloved dog Killie than a human woman, and fosters a return to homosocial play within an increasingly serious adult environment.

Bio: Mercury Natis (they/them) is a student of Imaginative Literature at Signum University with a focus on Tolkien Studies and Queer Theory. They hold a previous MA in Museum Education and a BA in Art History, and are working towards their PhD candidacy. Their primary focus is on queer resonances in interwar fantasy, in the pre-identity politics age of ambiguity and disruption. While they are mainly a Tolkienist, they will always come back to T. H. White, who they believe belongs firmly in the queer literary canon as an icon of camp fantasy.

Michael Quinn

Abstract: “The stolen future cannot be given back to me”: Exploring personal identity through Paragon in Robin Hobb’s ‘Realm of the Elderlings’

If fantasy provides a window onto cultural desires, the particularly consistent nature of epic fantasy worlds provide a fictional environment where identity formation can be systematically explored by the writer and experienced by the reader. Through her subversive approach to exploring the variable effects of trauma, ancestry and the unconscious on personal identity, Robin Hobb investigates how the dynamic nature of physical and metaphysical states of being impacts personal identity. In this context, I evaluate how Paragon, an anthropomorphic dragon(s) become ship, challenges our understandings of the fantastic. Hobb’s writing represents a progressive development within post-Tolkien fantasy, adopting a significantly different approach to Tolkien’s imitators (Wetherill, 2015). Hobb’s inherently logical and immersive fantasy rejects archetypes, such as wizards, or subverts them; her depiction of dragons, similarly to Le Guin, ‘serve as loci for exploring ethical and ecological issues’ rather than fiery opponents who must be defeated (Sangster, 2023). Hobb subverts fantasy tropes ‘to critically comment on the ideologies and practices of colonisation’ (Young, 2014), developing characters of psychological depth capable of authentic and complex relationships. The generational effects of post-colonialism on identity are explored through Paragon, an example of how our ‘many selves … stem from a history that is transcendent of individual intentionality’ (Radhakrishnan, 1991). Hobb’s depiction of Paragon demonstrates how subversive fantasy can ‘transform the relations of the imaginary and the symbolic’ (Jackson, 1981), encouraging readers to question conservative ideologies of the self. For many readers, fantasy is a formative element of cultural socialisation, one which may have a significant impact on personality development, especially its imaginative component. Consequently, adopting this interdisciplinary approach to fantasy, given that its dream-like imagery represents unconscious ideas through metaphysical depictions of identity, can elicit important discourses on its potential to develop readers’ understanding of identity formation, specifically the depth component of identity.

Bio: I am currently undertaking a PhD project in the Philosophy of Education, focusing on the possibilities of teaching philosophical concepts through speculative fiction, at the University of Glasgow. My main interests are in fantasy literature, having completed a MLitt in Fantasy, and in exploring intersections between literature and philosophy as well as how they complement one another. I’ve taught English in high schools in Scotland, Spain and Australia and I’m currently enrolled in the Children’s Fantasy Literature course at Glasgow. I love almost all things fantasy, but mainly Robin Hobb, Ursula Le Guin, Arthurian literature, and, of course, Tolkien.

Nathaniel Harrington

Abstract: Teachd Chonain: Celticism, settler colonialism, and the fantasy barbarian

In this paper, I offer a historicization of the figure of the barbarian in sword and sorcery and later genre fantasy, focusing on the entanglement of the barbarian with fantasy’s Celticism, the appropriation and (re)interpretation of Celtic-language cultures and literatures by dominant-language writers and artists. I begin by briefly tracing the influence of popular Celticism on the fantasy barbarian, from James Macpherson’s Ossian through Standish James O’Grady’s Cuculain trilogy to Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Bran Mak Morn and then to contemporary high fantasy, focusing on the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. I look especially at the relationship between the figure of the barbarian in Howard and Dungeons & Dragons and perceptions of “Celts” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial thought and argue that even as the fantastic barbarian has drawn on a wider array of signifiers, it remains closely tied to racialist conceptions of the Celts but with an inverted valuation, recuperating the Celts into a colonial and white supremacist fantasy combining Celtic, Germanic, and Indigenous elements. In a contemporary context, I argue that the Celticist barbarian of modern fantasy serves as both a continuation of the nineteenth-century relegation of Celtic-language communities to the fringe of “civilization” and as a settler-colonial replacement fantasy where Celtic “barbarian” can replace the Indigenous population whose societies and religions, refracted through colonial anthropology, are displaced and projected from the colonized Other into fantasy’s constructed (now-white) heroic “Celt”.

Bio: Nathaniel Harrington has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto; in 2023-2024 he is an assistant professor in the Department of Celtic Studies at St. Francis Xavier University. His current projects are a critical study of “Celtic fantasy” and an exploration of the relationships between linguistic marginalization and speculative fiction. His other interests include Scottish Gaelic folklore, the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno, speculative reading practices, and meeting new cats.

Nick Stember

Abstract: Desert Solitaire: Tales of the Strange, Fantastic, and Immortal in Nie Jun’s Seekers of the Aweto In this paper I will be considering Chinese cartoonist Nie Jun’s ongoing manhua (comic book) series, Seekers of the Aweto (Tian Chong Cao). Launched in February 2022 with The Hunt Is On (Dadi de zhuilie), the first of three projected volumes, the series is set in a semi-mythical alternate universe. By opening with an artist painting on the wall of a cave in Dunhuang, an important site for Buddhist, Taoist, and other syncretic religious practices located on the Silk Road in today’s far western Gansu province, Nie suggests that the story about to be told will take place in the medieval period of 200 to 1000 CE. The tale which unfolds, however, is quickly revealed to be one in which magical spirits and demons roam the land, most important among them being the sacred Aweto, who protect and nourish life in the arid desert landscape of central Asia. In my reading of this comic, I show that in so doing, Nie draws both on the historical legacy of “tales of fantastic” (chuanqi) and “strange” (zhiguai) events, and also on the more contemporary tradition of xianxia or “immortal heroes.” Despite presenting a potential allegory for contemporary social tensions, I find that Seekers of the Aweto exists in uneasy tension with political engagement, reveling instead in the anarchic free play of image and text. In this amorphous “third space” of unreal phantasy, Nie is able to forge a world of ecological (im)possibilities that is only dimly described by procrustean readings of subversive (or indeed, authoritarian) intent. As such, the case is made that this is a text which ultimately embraces harmony with nature, and the reclusive “non-doing” of early Taoists such as Laozi and Zhuangzi.

Bio: Nick Stember (he/him) is a historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture. He recently defended his PhD dissertation on “pulp science” in early Reform-era (1976-1986) comic books in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. Next year he will be joining the New East Asian Museum Tales project at the National Museum of Denmark as a postdoctoral researcher, where he will be exploring depictions of Taoist self-cultivation in popular culture.

Abstract: Age’s Mischief: Writing Ageing into the Fantastika in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , characters grapple with the haunting presence of the she-dragon, Querig. Believed to be all-powerful and treacherous by most humans, Querig is also the origin of a forgetfulness that spreads like a plague across the lands. However, by the end of the novel, it is revealed that Querig is, in fact, frail and dying, contrary to the widespread belief in her timelessness. While The Buried Giant features no shortage of ageing characters, given that the protagonists are an elderly couple, the most striking representation of ageing emerges through the dragon—a fantastical creature. This paper aims to investigate how the prevalent theme of decline narratives, common in contemporary cultures, is reimagined within a fantasy setting and applied to fantastic creatures. By delving into the portrayal of ageing creatures and the depiction of intra-specific interactions, often asymmetrical and unethical, this research seeks not only to interrogate the dangers of decline narratives but also to emphasise how these narratives, when woven into fantastical realms, equate ageing with the non-human—blurring the lines between us and the fantastical. This examination of the representation of ageing in the fantastical setting of The Buried Giant hopes to contribute to a broader understanding of the implications of decline narratives and their impact on our relationship between both ageing human and non-human entities. This exploration seeks to shed light on the ethical dimensions of such narratives, encouraging a reconsideration of how we perceive and portray ageing within the realms of fantasy literature.

Bio: Ning Lee is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where she earned her master’s degree in Literature and Modernity: 1900 to the Present. For her master’s dissertation, she explored ethics and orphanhood in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro. She will start pursuing a doctoral degree at National Taiwan University this spring. Ning’s engagement with Ishiguro’s works has been a transformative aspect of her academic journey, significantly shaping her research interests. Beyond her dedication to Ishiguro’s oeuvre, she is committed to examining the complexity of ageing and old age in contemporary society through the lens of literary and cultural productions.

Olivia Scarr

Abstract: (Un)homely Cultivations: the botanical Other as the ‘Monstrous Feminine’ in Short Fiction of the Fin de Siècle

By the end of the 19th century, domestic horticulture was a well-established bourgeois pastime, with indoor cultivation of ‘exotic’ plant species made possible, firstly, by a proliferating industry of plant importation from England’s colonies, and, secondly, glazed glass cases which allowed for the protected transfer of plants. Victorians were confronted with strange plant species both on foreign territory and in the heart of their home, where the natural world was (re)created in glasshouses. Building on Homi Bhabha’s understanding of Freud’s unheimlich as capturing “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place” (141), this paper focuses on Victorians’ conceptualisations of the botanical Other in relation to, and contention with, their novel surroundings; anti-mimetic fictions of the time created worlds very similar to the Victorian reader’s own, yet interspersed these with strange and fantastical elements, and in the late 19th century, analogous to other monsters of the era (i.e. Dracula), plants developed an appetite for (fictional) human beings. Putting to question the explicit feminisation and sexualisation of plant horror fiction, this paper highlights Victorians’ ambiguous engagement with their natural environment in short fictions of the period, i.e. Fred M. White’s ‘The Purple Terror’ (1898), H. G. Wells’ ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894), Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893) and ‘The Lost World’ (1912), probing beyond the various ‘faces’ of the monstrous feminine to investigate ideological struggles and material strategies of fin de siècle society contending with the vast expansion and simultaneous diminution of their known world.

Bhabha, Homi K. “The World and the Home”. Social Text 31/32. Third World and Post-colonial Issues (1992): 141-153.

Bio: Olivia Scarr (she/her) Born 1993 in Vienna and raised in Austria and South Africa, she studied Comparative Literature and History at the University of Vienna before graduating with a master’s degree in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Alongside her studies she tutored bachelor and master students of the English department (literature and cultural theory courses) while personally specialising in the field of (Victorian) materiality studies and medical and environmental humanities. She has worked in theatre (dramaturgy) and for designaustria, is an avid reader of fantasy and historical fiction, and dabbles in novel writing from time to time.

Rachel Cairns

Abstract: Fat in the Forgotten Realms: Fat embodiment, monstrosity and the non-normative body in participatory fantasy storytelling This paper will interrogate the potentiality for fat embodiment and occupation of the non-normative and monstrous body in participatory fantasy storytelling – namely, in digital and tabletop role-playing games. Fat studies scholars have established fatness as a discrediting characteristic that limits one’s access to the status of personhood (Farrell, 2023), or a readable text that offers a shorthand for laziness, lack of morality, and indulgence in excess (Murray, 2008). In short, fatness marks one as Other, and as existing in a monstrous or non-normative body. This paper will investigate participatory storytelling as a potentially radical site of fat liberation and exploration, utilising Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 , and Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition system as two linked but unique case studies. An important aspect that this paper will consider is fat embodiment, which fat scholar Kimberly Dark argues is central to achieving fat liberation (Dark, 2023). That is to say, it must be considered to what extent we are granted access to the inner worlds of fat characters. I will consider to what extent, through character creation and customisation, and play and choice, players are able to interact with and embody fatness. Some fat studies scholars consider that liberation can be found in embracing the monstrous status of the fat body – especially when considered in intersection with racial and genderqueer liberation (White, 2021; Owen, 2015). This paper will take special care considering how imagined racial difference and monstrous classification, central to the construction of Dungeons and Dragons (Carpenter, 2023), might complicate or reinforce racialised fatphobia. I will consider if either the digital or tabletop role-playing game format can be used to deconstruct the fat/person dialectic and the normative body, or if fatphobia is entrenched and reinforced by the systems that construct them.

Bio: Rachel Cairns (she/her) is a first-year PhD researcher at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on fatness and monsters who eat in 19th-century fairy tales and monster fiction. Also at Strathclyde, Rachel received her BA Hons in English, Creative Writing and Journalism and MLitt with Distinction in Interdisciplinary English Studies. Rachel is a recipient of the Peggy Grant Prize and the Global Research Award. In 2019-2021, Rachel served as a Sabbatical Officer, where she rooted her work within liberation work, and received the Strathclyde Women in Leadership Network Committee’s Choice Champion Award.

Rachel Harrison

Abstract: From Her Mind to Herland: The Women Conjuring Gynotopia My paper focuses on the ‘conjured worlds’ of Gynotopia. This referring to the phenomenon of female Science Fiction authors creating countries, cities or entire planets inhabited by and designed solely around the needs of women. Through the emancipatory powers of the female mind, these worlds reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. They invert gender roles to critique gendered hierarchies and spheres in society such as the scientific, religious, and political which women have historically been excluded from. These female authors conjure fictional worlds in which we witness an extreme inversion of the position of women in society, resulting in men becoming the ‘othered’ sex. Men become the victims, the subjugated, the reduced or simply the erased. This is explored through methods of psychological subjugation in Katharine Burdekin’s The End of This Day’s Business (1989). Other Gynotopias explore physical gender segregation such as the female-only worlds of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905), and Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1890). Some dissolve notions of gender binary altogether such as Burdekin’s Proud Man (1934), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While men in these worlds are othered, seen as lesser or as a threatening, non-human presence, women are depicted as goddesses. They are often larger, stronger, less fragile creatures – Amazonian in nature, thriving in their unbridled existence. However, there is a darker side to the reimagined women of the Gynotopia. Often (in Anglophone Gynotopias) this ‘superwoman’ is depicted as inherently Aryan. Thus, unfortunately, the Gynotopias of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in particular fail in their feminism as they promote the pseudo-science of eugenics in their quest for perfection. I will explore the reasons for women conjuring these Gynotopias, outlining their characteristics and their lesser-discussed flaws using the case studies mentioned above.

Bio: My name is Rachel Harrison. I am in the third year of my PhD at the University of Dundee. My thesis title is ‘Reclaiming Gynotopia: Female Authored Ustopian Novels and Science Fiction’. My research interests include lesser recognised female SF authors who have made a large contribution to SF and utopian fiction. I also specialise in ‘Gynotopia’ or Feminist Utopian Fiction. I had a paper published in the SFRA Fall Issue 2022 titled ‘Exploring the Banishment and Reformation of Masculinity in Scientific Gynotopias’ in which I discuss what I identify as the 2 key models of Gynotopia and their approach to masculinity (Separatist and Integrational).

Rebecca Gault

Abstract: (Re)Creating Marginalised Identity in the Omegaverse

Fan culture is the site of reinterpretation of popular media including, but not limited to, the practice of writing fanfiction. Within the culture of fanfiction is a proliferation of subgenres, one of which is that of the omegaverse. Omegaverse fanfiction constitutes an alternate universe wherein characters from media are written into a surrogate structure of gender; as alphas, betas, or omegas. By examining the trends within Omegaverse fanfiction in the context of fan studies and feminist theory, we can explore how these transformative texts intercede in conversations about sex and gender within the original texts. When we consider Omegaverse fanfictions as operating within the speculative mode, we can break sex and gender discourses down into building blocks with which fanfiction authors are free to rebuild a new structure with. Within this speculative mode, however, we often see that marginalisation is recreated; omegas are often derided and looked down upon within the original conception of this gender structure while alphas are seen as desirable and betas as nothing out of sorts. In constructing this hierarchy, Omegaverse authors are given a lens through which they can examine the marginalisation of those marked as Other by their gender signifier. Throughout, this paper will aim to explore the alternate gender structure provided by the Omegaverse and the ways in which this can function as a form of ‘low theory’ – as established by Halberstam – with the possibility to explore different ways of thinking when it comes to sex and gender.

Bio: Rebecca Gault is an early-career academic from Glasgow, Scotland. She has a MA in English Literature and an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. Their research interests include monstrosity, gender and sexuality studies, LGBTQ+ studies, and modes of fantasy. With previous research on the sexual and gender politics of monstrosity in fantasy literature, she is an up-and-coming researcher and writer in fields of the fantastic. She is the co-host of Out To Get You, a queer horror podcast (@OutToGetYouPod on Instagram) featuring guests such as award-winning author Gretchen Felker-Martin. Rebecca can be found on BlueSky at @phoenixforce.

Rebecca Lloyd

Abstract: Reuse, recycle: Terry Pratchett’s Igors and the monstrous remade body.

Margrit Shildrick (2002) argues that the indeterminacy of the monster body disturbs as it exposes assumptions about how we figure identity. Conflicting claims about the body as a guarantor of identity, challenging the security of distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘others’, are evident in representations of the Igors, minor but recurring humanoid characters in the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett. Igors practice various surgeries and modifications both on themselves and others, thus literally embodying visually and philosophically competing discourses about bodies and forcing a reflection on whether identity and the body are self-evidently synonymous. The Discworld novels as fantasy literature incorporate elements not entirely possible in Roundworld, (our world), and the tribe of Igors have certain strange magical powers. But Discworld echoes and refracts Roundworld designations of monstrosity because responses to Igors, both of humour and terror, demonstrate Shildrick’s claim that monsters ‘are always too close for comfort’. Devoted to science and medical practices situating the body as the passive recipient of the anatomo-clinical gaze, Igors conduct transplantations amongst themselves and for others, taking parts from the dead as prosthetics, repairing and making whole the living because they believe that to do otherwise is wasteful. If their actions in restoring bodies to completeness apparently reinscribe the social biases of ableism, Igors themselves, bearing scars and non-normative bodies as signifiers of skill and belonging, present an alternative view of normality. But they are also bio-artificers, crossbreeding species and artificially growing body parts, creating non-human and vegetable hybrids with often horrific results. This paper will explore how Pratchett challenges the reader on presumed certainties about the relationship of identity to the body, exposing anxieties as both nonsensical, through humour, and, yet, simultaneously terrifying, so that we must ask ourselves who makes monsters?

Bio: I am an independent researcher on Terry Pratchett, Gothic creatures, landscapes and humour: publications include ‘Dead Pets’ Society: Gothic Animal Bodies in the Films of Tim Burton’ in Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely (2021), and ‘The Human Within and the Animal Without? Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents’ in Gothic Animals (2020). My most recent publication is ‘Ghostly Objects and the Horrors of Ghastly Ancestors in the Ghost Stories of Louisa Baldwin’ in Women’s Writing , Vol. 29 (2), July 2022, with co-author Professor Ruth Heholt.

Rebecca Pearce

Abstract: “All in a Day’s Work for a Hero”: Once Upon a Time and the Fantastical Byronic Hero-Villain Cycle

Peter Thorslev argues at the turn of the 19th century, gothic literature had created a ‘peculiar hybrid ‘hero-villain’ or ‘villainous hero’ (6). Lord Byron, inspired by these tales, created his ‘Byronic Hero’, a dark, brooding and mysterious figure, but most importantly ‘ensouled and humanized’ (8). Byronism is revived across two hundred years of fantasy fiction; in the figure of the vampire, werewolf and other supernatural beings. Created on the brink and between the boundary of both hero and villain, the popularity and continual reimagining of the Byronic Hero demonstrates how our perspectives on all three archetypes can change. The Byronic appeared first as a villain Vampyr in John Polidori’s novella, and two centuries later, recast as the hero in Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Where the villain is often ‘Othered’, the contemporary Byronic hero re-centers this evil as sympathetic, thereby subverting normative boundaries. This is clear in Disney’s reimagining of their classic villain catalogue into heroic stories: Maleficent (2014), Cruella (2021), but particularly exemplified in Once Upon a Time (2012-18), a fantasy show that synthesises multiple Disney properties. This popularised Byronic Hero-Villain is illustrated in Captain Hook, a classic fairytale character given great pathos in the narrative quest to recast him as a hero and love interest. Rumplestiltskin is an amalgamation of multiple fairytale villains, several non-human. He serves as Hook’s foil, reflecting both sides of the Byronic Hero-Villain coin. I argue that this repeated re-centering of what it means to be a hero and villain is a cycle. Using Once Upon a Time ‘s villainous characters, I demonstrate our current cycle of villains turned heroes destabilises simple categories. Drawing upon both Byronic scholarship and fantasy research, this study aims to draw out the cyclical nature between the archetypal Byronic hero, fantasy villains, and re-embracing the ‘Other’.

Bio: Rebecca Pearce is a PhD Researcher at Brunel University London; her thesis is titled “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”: Feminist Revisions of Byronic Heroes in Contemporary Fantasy Television”, explores the popular archetype’s representation in modern television. Having previously studied her MA (Birkbeck, University of London) and BA (Brunel) in Film and TV, her interests are focused on the supernatural and intersection of pop culture & literature. She has written for Critical Studies in Television (CST) Online and recently published a book review in Revenant Journal: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural .

Scarlett Butchers

Abstract: “This was a place of wonders once”: David Rudkin’s Magical Landscapes ‘“This was a place of wonders once”: David Rudkin’s Magical Landscapes’ examines the ways in which the fantastical elements in David Rudkin’s 2009 stage play Merlin Unchained , particularly examples of magic, seem to emanate from the natural landscapes within which the human characters live. Throughout this play, magic is deeply embedded within the fabric of the earth and this manifests both through creating a landscape that is in some way sentient while also allowing magical abilities to be passed from the earth to human characters, becoming a gift granted to those who forge true connections with nature. Using both an ecocritical and cultural materialist approach this paper will suggest that through examining the portrayal of magic in this play it is possible to gain a greater understanding of how the land was viewed at the time of the play’s conception. Therefore, this approach will also create a space to consider how this perception has changed in our current state of climate crisis. This paper will argue that the magic occurring throughout Merlin Unchained is directly shaped by the relationship between the natural landscape and the characters that live within it, becoming a dynamic force that manifests differently depending on the state of this connection.

Bio: Scarlett Butchers is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Lincoln exploring the relationship between people and the land in the work of dramatist David Rudkin. Her research interests include the impact of landscape on national identity, folk horror and sentient landscapes throughout art and literature. An overarching interest for Scarlett is the way the climate crisis haunts popular culture, appearing in different guises but remaining ever-present.

Şevval Tufan

Abstract: Liminal Worlds, Marginalised Beings and Disabled Bodies in Ihsan Oktay Anar’s The Atlas of Misty Continents and Amat Ihsan Oktay Anar, a renowned name in the world of Turkish Literature, takes his readers on a mesmerizing journey through the captivating worlds of his fantastical literary works. One of his most remarkable works is Puslu Kıtalar Atlası (translated as The Atlas of Misty Continents ), where he expertly weaves postmodern elements into his writing. In this enthralling tale, time seems to have lost its grip and the characters appear detached from their surroundings. As the story reaches its conclusion, a surprising turn of events reveals that these characters, who have been constant companions throughout the narrative, are nothing but figments of a dream. Anar’s skilled storytelling transforms familiar places into mysterious and enigmatic realms, leaving readers spellbound. Anar’s masterful placement and portrayal of fantastical creatures in his works grant us profound glimpses into the intricate landscapes of his imaginative worlds. Within this surreal realm, certain characters, marked by their unique physical appearances and disabled bodies, face marginalization within the context of the story. Moreover, Anar skillfully incorporates culturally-inspired entities like vampires, ghouls, and karakoncolos, imbuing his fabricated universes with a distinct and intriguing dynamic. This study draws upon Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Theory” as its conceptual lens, exploring the intersection of disability studies and posthuman studies in the analysis of İhsan Oktay Anar’s Puslu Kıtalar Atlası and Amat . By closely examining the characters situated within these interwoven worlds, the research sheds light on their experiences of marginalization, their embodiment of minority identities, their disabilities, and how they are perceived as monstrous beings.

Bio: Şevval Tufan (she/her), completed her BA in English Language and Literature with a minor in Translation and Interpreting at Hacettepe University, Turkey in 2022. Currently, she is advancing her academic journey with an MA in American Culture and Literature at the same institution. Beyond her studies, Şevval works as a lecturer at Ankara Science University. Her research interests are ecofeminism, science fiction, fantastic studies, and video game studies.

Siravich Khurat

Abstract: Shoukan: The Summoners who conjure the other Half of their Souls

Otherwise known as evocation, the act of summoning is one form of conjuration. Those wielding the art of calling upon another being are Summoners. With Japanese Fantasy as the scope, this paper has classified summoners into Singular Summoners who are bound to a partner and Compendium Summoners who are able to summon a selection of beings. For this paper, the interest lies in exploring the former under the framework of a partnership between a human and a ‘monster’ (the inhuman) to examine how the monster reflects the human as one-half of their soul, as explored in Digimon (Digital Monster) Media Mix series. To elaborate, when a partnership is formed only between one human and their corresponding monster, we can observe the interaction between the two and how one influences the other. Quintessentially, the monster tends to embody an aspect of the human, whether ideal or hidden. The paper will analyse closely how such a partnership presents the duality of the Other and the Self and how the representation of monsters across iterations conforms and challenges expectations of their fantastical origins and respective narratives. To that end, the analysis will apply theoretical discourse regarding monsters and their relationships to humans, including Cohen’s seven theses of monster (1996) and Zwan’s psychoanalysis into ‘monster’ (2022), to scrutinise two focal samples of singular partnership this paper has observed. One is an archetypal partnership that emerges through Digimon, Final Fantasy (a Japanese Role-Playing Game series), and Persona (a JPRG series). In parallel to this cross-series observation, the other is a partnership group in a single (JRPG) series: Kiseki/Trails. This dual scrutiny is expected to illuminate the Self-Other dynamic in Fantasy critically while concurrently revealing the creative approach to character design formed from such duality.

Bio: Siravich Khurat is a first-year PhD student at the University of Portsmouth, with affiliation to the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries’ School of Film, Media, and Communication, who holds an MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. His interest lies in studying specific themes within the Fantasy genre across a range of compatible stories. He has a particular focus on Japanese narratives across media (Japanese Media Mix) and a keen interest in creative writing in English that integrates aspects of Japanese storytelling.

Supriya Baijal

Abstract: Magical Realms of Morality and Mystery: Reimagining Reality in The Adventures of Amir Hamza and Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie

This paper aims to explore the conjured worlds and creatures in Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza and the translation of Śivadāsa’s Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie , emphasizing their role in reimagining fundamental aspects of existence. Both texts, deeply rooted in medieval Indo-Persian and Sanskrit epics, offer a rich tapestry of fantastical elements that challenge and redefine our perceptions of reality, morality, and identity. In The Adventures of Amir Hamza , the translation unveils a world where the heroic, the magical, and the ethical intersect. This narrative conjures a realm where Amir Hamza, a legendary warrior, battles against not just physical adversaries but also engages with moral dilemmas, often against a backdrop of mystical creatures and fantastical settings. The paper will explore how these elements of fantasy serve to illuminate and question traditional notions of heroism, justice, and human emotion. Similarly, Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie presents a series of magical tales woven with riddles and moral quandaries. The fantastical genie and the narrative’s setting in an otherworldly realm invite readers into a space where reality is constantly reimagined. Each tale, culminating in a challenge to King Vikramaditya, serves as a conduit for exploring deeper philosophical and ethical questions, effectively using the fantasy genre to probe the essence of dharma and leadership. The study aims to demonstrate how these ancient narratives, through their fantastical creatures and conjured worlds, offer unique insights into the human condition. By examining how these texts use fantasy to delve into themes of morality, leadership, and identity, the paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of fantasy literature as a medium for exploring complex human experiences. The analysis will underscore the transformative power of fantasy in reimagining our perceptions of the known world, highlighting the enduring relevance and depth of these classic tales in contemporary discourse.

Bio: Dr Supriya Baijal has a PhD in Children’s Literature and Literary Theory from Dayal Bagh Educational Institute, Agra. She is currently at student at Trinity College Dublin where she is pursuing a MPhil in Digital Humanities. She has presented papers at several international conferences and has attend two summer schools in children’s literature at University of Antwerp.

Abstract: Holly Berries Like Drops of Blood: Conjuring the Green Knight as Monster in Prose and Film

“No monster tastes of death but once”, writes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Monster Culture (Seven Theses), but it’s debatable whether the Green Knight ever tastes death at all, in most versions of the tale. This paper proposes to read different incarnations of the Green Knight through the lens of monster theory, particularly in the monster’s role “as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment” (Cohen, 1996) and as an intermingled figure of both fear and desire. The “physically attractive, splendidly dressed” (Winny, 2001) Knight of the original poem already exhibits some of the monstrous tension between fear and desire that later writers have emphasised and explored. Kat Howard’s short story ‘The Green Knight’s Wife’ (2016) is a subversion in which the Knight’s game, having continued into the modern era, is turned back on him by his long-suffering wife who is sick of her part in it. Her story Once, Future (2018) also features a Green Knight, but this one is a figure disembodied from his cultural moment, “a thing unique, sole and unexpected” (Howard, 2018) but one out of time, with no more role to play beyond his presence. David Lowery’s 2021 film version of The Green Knight performs a separation of sorts between the Knight, figure of fear conjured up by Gawain’s mother, and Sir Bertilak, figure of desire. This separation is not complete, however, and is blurred by Gawain’s anxious fear of desire itself, and the film also complicates the original story’s kissing game by doubling Bertilak’s wife with Essel, Gawain’s forbidden love. Through these texts, I plan to examine the ways in which these monstrous Knights find themselves drawn into the same actions time after time in different contexts, and how the structure of this centuries-old tale grows around them even when transplanted into new soil.

Bio: Tam Moules has an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow and a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Anglia Ruskin University. Their research is currently focused on queerness in Arthuriana, and outside of academia their creative practice is currently focused on photography.

Abstract: Made a Villian: ND Stevenson’s Nimona and a Lesson in Difference ND Stevenson’s science fiction fantasy graphic novel Nimona (2015) and the film adaptation Nimona (2023) details the journey of Nimona – a shape-shifting, chaos-brewing villain-in-training – as she recruits Ballister Blackheart as her mentor. Together, the most sought-after villains attempt to dismantle the Institute, the ruling organization that maintains control through force. While several articles examine Nimona’s fluid identities, gender, and more generally heteronormative perspectives, this project shifts to focus on Ballister Blackheart. I posit that perceived as the main villain, Blackheart is a refreshing reimagination of a villain with a disability. Unlike more historical comics such as Mole Man, Donovan Caine, and Dr. Poison which José Alaniz catalogs, Blackheart is perceived as a villain by a world that refuses to see fault in the oppressive entity that is the Institution, however, he is not actually villainous. In fact, part of Blackheart’s “villainy” is his rigid morals, namely that he attempts to minimize damage to the environment and beings around him. Blackheart’s loss of his right arm during a routine joust physically and socially disables Blackheart’s aspirations to serve the Institute. Even in Stevenson’s fantasy world, being disabled limits one’s options because of society’s perception. Blackheart is fully capable of living independently, and the various enhancements to his cyborg arm enable him to be a successful hero, not a villain. This project is a close analysis of Blackheart as a disabled character and argues that he is made into a villain only through the lens of a society that continues to cling to its conventional beauty standards and ostracizes anyone who does not fit. Stevenson’s novel provides insight into how a world so focused on superficial control and privileging specific bodies can still be changed through the actions and words of beings that have been cast off and villainized by the world.

Bio: Tara West is a Ph.D. student from the Literature for Children and Young Adults program at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include examining portrayals of relationships that break and dismantle cisheteronormative assumptions and investigating representations of characters with disabilities in young adult speculative literature.

Vaibhav Dwivedi

Abstract: Of Faceless Monsters and Secret Terrors: Analysing the Hybrid Anatomy of Slenderman

Slenderman is yet another mysterious creature in a long-standing tradition of urban-legends. However, at the heart of its fame lies a persistent riddle. As a monster that resides wholly on the internet, the truth about its fictive status is merely a click away. A puzzling question emerges – despite knowledge of such bogus origins, why did Slenderman still accumulate such widespread belief? This paper seeks to analyse Slenderman’s ‘monstrosity’ by examining its hybrid existence. I will incorporate a three-pronged approach to understand this anomaly – at the level of the physical, behavioural and narrative. Slenderman’s unusual physical traits – a humanoid presence accompanied by blank-face, its atypical psychological mannerisms – a sense of perpetual dread and inaction, portrays a creature that obfuscates the line between human and non-human. This paper argues that Slenderman’s horror emanates not from conventional markers of monstrosity but from the absence of what is deemed ‘normal’. Furthermore, the focus will be on Slenderman’s literary corpus. The web-of-stories that comprises its oeuvre are an array-of-texts written by multiple authors. As a result Slenderman will be read as an ‘authorless’ creature that has been incessantly appropriated. This paper will investigate the entanglement of the linguistic and the monstrous through the figure of the creature. Ultimately through the work of select scholars, the paper attempts to understand Slenderman as a democratic creature that defies easy categorisation. Slenderman is indeed a monster. But monsters rarely emerge out of a cultural void. They often contain within them the anxieties of the age. If Slenderman is truly the internet’s own monster, then one wonders – what does it tell us about our own beliefs? This paper seeks to look through the invisible cracks of the faceless monster and take a long hard look at its soul. One might be surprised by who – or what – lurks there.

Bio: Vaibhav Dwivedi is an Assistant Professor of English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. His research interests include Cartography in Literature, Film Studies and Fantasy Literature. He’s also an independent photographer and filmmaker.

Vincent Pritchard

Abstract: The Conjuring Trinary: Systems of Summoning When speaking about conjuration as a specific subset of magic in media, it is largely represented in one of three general methods, with room for some variability in individual stories and worlds. These three “subschools” of conjuring account for the lion’s share of instances wherein a character uses magic to “summon” something, be it a creature, an item, or a person. Instances of a creature being plucked from its life and home to do the bidding of the conjurer sit next to the creation of items and people from whole cloth simply by the clever use of magic. In this article I propose to set down the three main methods of summoning, and analyse each of them with a lens toward the moral and ethical questions surrounding each of them, employing examples from Magic: the Gathering, Green Lantern, Percy Jackson, and more similar. I argue that, among the various types of magic that a magician might employ, conjuration requires a more complex and nuanced understanding of morality by the caster in order to be able to call themselves “just,” and that the ideas that govern conjuration are both creative and destructive depending on the intent of the user.

Bio: Vincent Pritchard is a Ph.D. candidate at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he got his Master’s degree in 2023 in the field of Anglophone Literature, Media, and Culture. His doctoral focus is on the links between identity formation and participatory culture in cyberpunk. Vincent is a circus acrobat and adrenaline junkie in his free time, and he lives with his wonderful partner and their dog in Frankfurt. If you look, you might find him talking about books on YouTube.

Xiana Vázquez Bouzó

Abstract: Representations of the Alien Enemy in the Post-Anthropocene: Two Case Studies of Filmic Depictions of Otherness through Gender ( Under the Skin ) and Animality ( Nope )

Ever since the Hollywood science fiction films of the 1950s, the alien body has consistently embodied its contemporary social anxieties and fears. The tradition of hostile alien invasions within Hollywood cinema cannot be understood without looking at the history of US war propaganda against its long-standing political enemies: the Soviet Union, Japan and the Middle East. In this regard, we might think about films like The Thing from Another World (Nyby, 1951), The War of the Worlds (both Haskin’s 1953 and Spielberg’s 2005 versions), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) or Independence Day (Emmerich, 1996). Whereas alien invaders and predators in the 70s and 80s were dominated by the Alien saga initiated by Ridley Scott in 1979, as well as the Predator saga started by John McTiernan in 1987, the 21st century has been witness to more sympathetic visions of alien invaders, as shown in successful productions like Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival . I am particularly interested in the ways in which human-eating and predating aliens have moved from Alien ’s insectoid xenomorph or the scary creatures of Independence Day towards more complex creatures like those depicted in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) or Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022). The two alien creatures from these films will be the main focus of this paper, especially looking at the ways in which gender, sexuality, disability and animality intersect in the representation of alienness and Otherness in their bodies. Through an antispeciesist, post-anthropocentric lens, I will look at how discourses that are critical of the species hierarchy have soaked contemporary fiction in which superior creatures (like aliens, but also vampires or nonhuman animal apex predators) hunt and consume human beings, and how the representation of such consumption is influenced by other analytical categories that question bodily normativity and its subsequent discriminations.

Bio: Xiana Vázquez Bouzó is a PhD candidate in English Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds a BA in English Philology and two MAs in Gender Studies and Applied Philosophy, and she specializes in literature and film (especially horror and science fiction), Critical Animal Studies and Feminist Studies. She is currently working on the representation of human-eating monsters in 21st-century film from an antispeciesist perspective. In the last years, she has taken part in several international conferences and has published part of her work, sharing her research about monsters and Critical Animal Studies within popular culture.

Zainab Wahab

Abstract: Monsters of Greed and Guilt: Examining Mythical Monsters as Symbols of Oppression in Tumbbad and Ghoul Works of fantasy confront us with differences that challenge our self-perception and understanding of reality. Often symbolized by terrifying creatures, demons, and monsters, the portrayal of these differences invites us to reevaluate the power dynamics between diverse groups. In his seven theses, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen defines the monster’s body as a cultural body characterized by “difference made flesh” whose alterity “originate(s) Within”, thus creating a link between monsters and individuals who perceive them as such (Cohen 41). Using insights from Cohen’s analysis, this paper interprets the mythical monsters in the Indian Hindi film Tumbbad (2018) and Netflix miniseries Ghoul (2018) as manifestations of oppressive systems such as caste and Hindu majoritarianism in India. In Tumbbad , a demon God from Hindu mythology called Hastar epitomizes the insatiable greed of the upper caste society and the exploitation of women under Brahmanical patriarchy. While Tumbbad enables the critique of monstrous legacies, Ghoul presents a dystopian future where ghul, a demon from Arabic folklore, is summoned to avenge the institutional murder of a Muslim man by exposing and weaponizing the guilt of complicit individuals. As an embodiment of the oppressor’s guilt, ghul exposes the brutality of state-sanctioned violence and majoritarian politics. Building on Ashis Nandy’s conception of mythologization as a moralizing process, the paper delineates monsters as cultural products who anthropomorphize the oppressor’s greed, violence, and guilt, highlighting the threat posed by historically oppressive and prejudiced ideologies to democratic systems. Varying from the conventional interpretation of monsters as pathologized depictions of socio-cultural deviations, the paper identifies them as representations of the violence perpetuated by oppressive systems, thus unveiling the monster’s potential to question discriminatory traditions, challenge hegemonic regimes, and subvert the unjust order.

Bio: Zainab Wahab is a postgraduate student of English Literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests include the Aesthetics of Disgust, Body Horror, and Ecogothic. She writes poetry and enjoys reading about the architectural significance of historic buildings. Her preferred pronouns are She/Her.

Abstract: A Link Between the Historical Evolution of Creature Design in Fantastic Film and Fine-Grained Representation of Non-Human Experience?

In the last decades, special effect technologies have enabled significant changes in creature design: from Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons The 7th Voyage of Sinbad , to the performance capture of Andy Serkis as Golum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Regarding practical effects, there has been progress in materials and prosthesis-making, animatronics and puppetry. This evolution has been even more impressive in the field of digital effects, especially via computer generated images (CGI), motion and performance capture, and digital editing. But as the technologies progress, has creature design changed? In this paper I argue that progress in special effects technologies increased the potential for a finer grained representation of non-human experience. In Narratology Beyond the Human , David Herman argues that there is a spectrum between coarse-grained and fine-grained ways to represent the experience of a character. Can we link the evolution of creature design, special effects, and the representation of the inner lives of imaginary creatures? I will focus on two topics: the integration between the creature and its environment, and the use of movement as a representation of inner states (body language and expressivity). To support this analysis I will compare and contrast reptile and simian characters of various time periods, linking the body structure of the creature and special effect technologies of the time to overall expressivity. Examples will be taken from various Godzilla and King Kong films, as well as from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.

Bio: Zoe Wible is a PhD student in Film at the University of Kent. Her research interests include science-fiction and cognitive film theory. Following her master’s dissertation on the reception of androids in contemporary television show Westworld, she is now researching the relationship between imaginary creatures and storytelling conventions in visual narrative media. She also draws on recent developments in interactive media and forms of engagement, including video games and online fandom spaces. The provisional title for her thesis is: “Monster schemas and folk biology: A cognitive approach to science fiction characters in contemporary cinema”.

Zvonimir Prtenjača

Abstract: X-Men’s White Gaze: Conjuring an Apocalypse of Superheroines of Colour

Unlike their comic book counterparts which have, since at least the 1970s and with varying degrees of success, been stimulating discussions of the minorities Othered due to their racial and gender identities, the critically acclaimed and box office-smashing X-Men films produced throughout the past two decades have decidedly bypassed them. Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg, the director-screenwriter duo chiefly responsible for transposing the X-Men’s fantasy worlds from their source materials’ pages onto the silver screens, have conjured them up in live-action format under an objectifying White male gaze. This paper first briefly surveys how the X-Men film franchise utilizes this structure of dominance to centre its White male protagonists as agential lookers and proprietors of female characters of colour, the exoticized and domesticated looked-ats. It then engages in a close reading of Singer and Kinberg’s 2016 entry to the X-Men film series, X-Men: Apocalypse , in which the creators project their patriarchal desires towards African- and Asian-American women onto three superheroines, Storm, Jubilee, and Psylocke, and deliver them to the audiences through the eponymous antagonist’s and several White X-Men’s point of view. The component crucial to “maintaining” these women’s “intersecting oppressions,” argues the paper, are their gendered and racialized stereotypical renditions which Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images” (69). As Storm is ultimately contained within the image of the Magical Negress selflessly assisting the men around her, while Jubilee becomes their subservient and silent Lotus Blossom and Psylocke their hypersexualized and threatening Dragon Lady, the paper shows that X-Men: Apocalypse neither challenges these clichéd representations of African- and Asian-American women nor reflects their lived experiences through their mentioned cinematic surrogates. Rather, it sustains their depictions “as less human” and “more ‘natural’,” denying them “subjectivity” and fuelling off-screen “the political economy of domination” characteristic of “slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism” (Hill Collins 71).

Keywords: Black and Asian women, racial and gender stereotypes, superhero film, White gaze, X-Men: Apocalypse Works Cited: Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Second Edition. Routledge, 2000.

Bio: Zvonimir Prtenjača (he/him/his) is a third-year PhD candidate and a teaching assistant with the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, the Republic of Croatia), where he researches theories, politics, and practices of representation and difference in American popular culture. When he is not teaching English in his elementary school, he can be found either consuming excessive amounts of caffeinated beverages while annoying his girlfriend or watching and reading the newly released or published superhero film/TV show and comic book.

Realms of Imagination Launch Event

Thursday December 14 th , 6pm-7:30pm

Join the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic as we celebrate the launch of Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy , recently released by British Library Publishing as a companion volume to the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition.  This highly-illustrated book contains twenty essays providing a wide range of perspectives on Fantasy, its forms and its communities.  Collection editors Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster will be in conversation with essay authors Cristina Bacchilega , Dimitra Fimi , Sofia Samatar and Ann VanderMeer .

Cristina Bacchilega is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa and co-edits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies . Her books include Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997), Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place (2006), Fairy Tales Transformed?: 21 st -Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013) and several co-edited anthologies. Her current projects are collaborations, one on the fantastic in the Pacific, the other on justice in contemporary fairy tales.

Dimitra Fimi is Professor of Fantasy and Children’s Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. Both her monographs – Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2008) and Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy (2017) – won Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards; in 2021, she received the Outstanding Contribution to Tolkien Studies Award from the Tolkien Society. She co-edits the Perspectives on Fantasy book series (Bloomsbury) with Brian Attebery and Matthew Sangster.

Tanya Kirk is Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library, and is the lead curator for the major exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (2023-24). She previously co-curated several other literary exhibitions at the Library, including Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (2014) and Out of This World: Science Fiction (2011). She has edited five volumes of classic ghost stories drawn from the British Library’s collections, most recently Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights (2022).

Sofia Samatar ’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria (2013), won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her novel The Winged Histories (2016) completed the Olondria duology, and was followed by Tender: Stories (2017), Monster Portraits (with the artist Del Samatar; 2018) and The White Mosque: A Memoir (2022). She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.

Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History and Co- Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow.  His most recent book, An Introduction to Fantasy , was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.  His essays on Fantasy include work on Mervyn Peake, China Miéville and imaginary cities.  His other books include Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021), Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2022) and Remediating the 1820s (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2023).  He co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) the British Library’s 2011 exhibition The Worlds of Mervyn Peake and is external curator for Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (2023-24).

Ann VanderMeer is the founder of the award-winning Buzzcity Press. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales (the oldest Fantasy magazine in the world) for five years, during which she was nominated three times for the Hugo Award, winning once. She has won the British Fantasy Award, the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. Anthologies she has edited or co-edited include Best American Fantasy (2007 and 2008), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2011), The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (2011), The Time Traveller’s Almanac (2013), Sisters of the Revolution (2015), The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), Current Futures: A Sci-fi Ocean Anthology (2019), The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (2019), AVATARS INC. (2020) and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (2020). She currently works as an acquiring editor at Tor.com. Ann lives with her husband Jeff and their cat Neo in Tallahassee, Florida.

You can get your free ticket via this Eventbrite page .

GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds – Call for Papers

Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow 

Submissions Closed

Registration Coming Soon

Conference date: 15 th –17 th May 2024 (hosted online)    The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2024, to be held online on 15–17 May, with the theme of ‘Conjuring Creatures and Worlds’. 

Fantasy is inherently an act of conjuration. When we create, dismantle, or engage with fantasy, we are conjuring magic: the impossible, the mysterious, the unknown, and the indefinable. Conjuring fantasy is an act of creation not necessarily defined by our existing modes of being or reality, yet it is always in conversation with our own world. Thus, when we enter fantastika, we necessarily enter a conjured world that invites us to reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. One way it effects this is by encountering seemingly nonhuman creatures, through which we meet the magical, the uncanny, the monstrous, the Other, and perhaps most uncomfortably, ourselves. Brian Froud writes in Good Fairies Bad Faeries (1998) that “like any supernatural encounter, meeting a fairy—even one who is gentle and benign—is never a comfortable experience”. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Coody argue in Monstrous Women in Comics that “the monster is difference made flesh”. The same is often true of the worlds these creatures exist in. Conjurations, then, are not wholly foreign; their components are knowable. Through fantasy we can conjure, and therefore communicate, with the necessarily mysterious, the otherwise ineffable. 

The act of conjuration is an ambivalent one, being both beyond and outside our own world yet inherently connected to it and therefore susceptible to the same limitations and preconceptions. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature , Helen Young argues that “the logics of race and racial difference are so deeply ingrained in Western society that it is extremely difficult, often even for members of marginalised racial groups, to imagine worlds that do not have those structures.” Indeed, Fantastika has often been concerned with narratives where creatures “function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between identity groups”. We are interested in explorations of marginalised identities, including creatures, systems of magic, and worlds concerned with (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, class, and (dis)abilities. These conjured creatures and worlds offer an alternative viewpoint into other modes of identity and being. Additionally, the ways in which these fantasies are conjured is important. The medium through which the reader (in the broadest sense of the word) encounters and interacts with the fantasy affects its meaning.  

How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?  

GIFCon 2024 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins. We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024 , at midnight GMT.   

We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops, for those interested in exploring the creative processes of conjuring these creatures and worlds into being from a practice-based perspective. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5 th , 2024 at midnight GMT .  

If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at [email protected] . Please also read through our Code of Conduct . We look forward to your submissions!  

Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic 
• Creatures as corporeal and/or spiritual beings  
• Worlds and magic as material or conceptual spaces, realms, or structures 
• Multi-media representations of creatures, worlds, and creators 
• Creating and recreating race, class, queerness, (dis)ability and other marginalised identities in fantasy  
• Explorations and representations of the Other in fantastika 
• Attraction to, repulsion or rejection of creatures and the nonhuman 
• Depicting alienation, body dysphoria, body swapping and transformation in fantasy  
• The anthropomorphising of objects and creatures 
• Human and nonhuman binaries, hierarchies, and dynamics 
• Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of creatures e.g., mythic and supernatural traditions, folklore, fantastic tropes and iconic and archetypal characters  
• Representations of fantastical creatures for example cryptids, fae, magical creatures, supernatural beings, the undead, humanoids, animals, hybrids, AI, extraterrestrials, demons, monsters, horrors, boogeymen 
• Environments, alternate worlds, ecocriticism, posthumanism, the Anthropocene 
• Conjuring futures and pasts 
• Organic vs. artificial worlds, spaces and creatures 
• Conjuring as a destructive or creative act 
• Conjuring magic and magic systems 
• How fandoms and scholars recreate, reinterpret, or conjure creatures, worlds and magic systems 

Framing Fantasy: Brian Attebery and Matthew Sangster discuss the affordances of Fantasy

To celebrate the publication of Matthew Sangster’s An Introduction to Fantasy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works (Oxford University Press, 2022) receiving the 2023 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies, Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic invites you to an online conversation between the two authors, exploring how we can make compelling cases for Fantasy’s particular qualities and values. The discussion will take place via Zoom webinar on Thursday 5 October 2023 , and will be followed by a Q&A session.

Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. His new book, An Introduction to Fantasy , explores why Fantasy matters in the context of its unique affordances, its disparate pasts and its extraordinary current flourishing. His essays on Fantasy include work on Mervyn Peake, China Miéville and imaginary cities. His previous books include Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021), Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2022) and Remediating the 1820s (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2023). He co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) the British Library’s 2011 exhibition The Worlds of Mervyn Peake and is external curator for the upcoming exhibition Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination (2023-4) .

Brian Attebery is Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. He won the World Fantasy Award for his editing of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and has been honoured by both the Science Fiction Research Association and the Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for his scholarly work. During his time as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy at the University of Glasgow, he helped launch the Perspectives on Fantasy book series from Bloomsbury Academic Press, which he edits along with Dimitra Fimi and Matthew Sangster. His Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Fantasy: How It Works (2022) is his third, following previous awards for Strategies of Fantasy (1992) and Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2013).

Get your free ticket here !

CFP: Tolkien sessions at ICMS Kalamazoo 2024

The Call for Papers for the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA (May 9-11, 2024) is now open. Proposals of papers and contributions to roundtables are  due Sept. 15, 2022.  The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic , University of Glasgow, is sponsoring the following session: 

Here Be Dragons: Tolkien at the Medieval Margins

Modality: Virtual

Boundaries, margins and marginality are expanding areas of research in contemporary fantasy studies, in which Tolkien’s work is still central. Tolkien’s medievalist fantasy is particularly ripe for a reconsideration from the perspective of the edges rather than the centre: from negotiating the borders of fantastical geographies, to contested borders of genre within the legendarium, to acknowledging the perspective of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised readers, fans, and scholars. This session will continue the conversation which started at the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic’s 2023 international conference on boundaries and margins in fantasy .

Tolkien’s medievalist fantasy shows a keen interest in boundaries and margins: from negotiating fantastical geographies and their borders, to examining liminal characters in-between political/racial/cultural boundaries, even challenging borders of traditional genres within the legendarium (fairy-tale, romance, epic, science fantasy, etc.). At the same time, contemporary fantasy and Tolkien scholarship is at last opening up towards the experiences and perspectives of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised readers, fans, and scholars.

We invite paper proposals that seek to examine boundaries and margins in Tolkien’s legendarium, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed. 

All proposals must be made through the Congress’s Confex system.  Please carefully follow the instructions on the Congress’s  Call for Papers .

Deadline: Friday 15 September 2023

CFP: Tolkien sessions at IMC Leeds 2024

CFP: Leeds 2024 IMC Tolkien Sessions 

Paper abstracts are currently being sought for the following Tolkien sessions for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, 1-4 July 2024.  The special thematic strand of this conference will be ‘Crisis’.  See more here .

We are very pleased that the 2024 IMC Tolkien Sessions will again be sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow .

Paper submissions are being sought for the following sessions:  

Tolkien’s Medieval Sub-creation in Crisis 

This session will examine different concepts of crisis in Tolkien studies. Papers may explore the types of crises Tolkien himself created in the body of his legendarium by his revising of several keys stories and legends at different times in his lifelong work.  Papers can address the significance of these narratives and their revisions in Tolkien’s shifting ideas about the world and cultures he was inventing. Papers may also explore adaptations of Tolkien works and how they create crises in our evolving understanding of the canon of Tolkien’s work and its reception.  

Bodily Crises in Tolkien’s Medievalism 

Papers in this session can explore crises/concerns of gender and bodily difference in Tolkien’s works including sexuality and disability.  Indicative areas to be examined include the role of bodies under physical duress, punishment, injury from battle or war, as well as bodies in transformation including prosthetics, spiritual transformation (good or evil) and how bodies and body transformation from Tolkien’s works are depicted in illustrations and in films and other media.  

Racial Medievalism in Tolkien Studies – A Session Celebrating the Works of Professor Dimitra Fimi, founder of Tolkien at Leeds

Papers in this session may respond to, critique and develop key ideas regarding Tolkien’s representations of race that were first explored in  Professor Dimitra Fimi’s ground-breaking 2008 book  Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits , which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2010. Fimi’s evolving body of work has brought to light neglected aspects of Tolkien’s creativity and world-building, including the centrality of the Elves, the role of linguistic invention, and the relationships between race and material culture in Middle-earth This session invites papers that explore Tolkien’s contexts, racial representations and world-building through engaging with and building upon the approaches Professor Fimi has set out in her academic work.

Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches

This continuing Tolkien at Leeds session will accommodate wider topics and new approaches to Tolkien’s medievalism, ranging from source studies and theoretical readings to comparative studies of Tolkien’s works and Middle-earth studies.  

Crises in Researching Tolkien: A Round Table 

The Annual Tolkien at Leeds roundtable will explore the current crises facing Tolkien teachers, academics and researchers in Tolkien and Middle-earth studies.  Topics can include the various adaptions of Tolkien’s works that will continue to grow with new media deals, differing thoughts on treatment of Tolkien’s race, culture and sexuality in his works and the desire of scholars to see, analyse and contextualise more of Tolkien’s remaining unpublished papers.   

• Please submit a paper contribution title and abstract  by 31 August 2023  to  Dr. Andrew Higgins ( [email protected] ) 
• Length of abstracts: 150 words (max!)  
• Papers will be 15-20 minutes long (3 paper sessions will be preferred) 
• With your abstract, please include name and details of contributor (affiliation, address, and preferred e-mail address)

Restorying Trans Game Studies: Playing with Memory, Fiction, and Magic as Sites for Transformative Identity Work

Join us on 20 July 2023, at 6pm BST , for an online talk and Q&A with  Dr Theresa Jean Tanenbaum ,  Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. Her talk is entitled:  “Restorying Trans Game Studies: Playing with Memory, Fiction, and Magic as Sites for Transformative Identity Work” . The event will be chaired by Gabriel Elvery.

Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) is a game designer, artist, activist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where she is a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Dr. Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, and research. Her work seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. These experiences of transformative theatrical play create possibility models that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit new identities that create possibilities where there were none before and reclaim power and agency denied to them.

An experienced game designer, Tess’s work incorporates physical objects, wearable technology, and interactive tabletops to explore embodied interactions with digital games and stories. She has developed new gaming technologies that push the boundaries of personal fabrication, using 3D printers and laser cutters as platforms for hybrid digital/physical games. Her new book on Playful Wearable Technologies, co-authored with Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez-Segura, Ella Dagan, and Oguz Burak, will be released by MIT Press in 2023.

Dr. Tanenbaum has been instrumental in helping create new, more inclusive, policies within the academic publishing world that make it possible for people to correct their names on previously published scholarship. In 2020 she co- founded the Name Change Policy Working Group to support other transgender people in advocating for inclusive identity policies within publishing and beyond. During her recent sabbatical she completed the songs for an upcoming autobiographical musical about gender transition during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is currently in the process of leaving academia to pursue a more creative and artistic career.

Talk Description:

In this talk I argue that game design – like magic and activism – is a framework for invoking and materializing seemingly impossible desires for ourselves, and our world. Within the “magic circles” of both play and witchcraft we assert truths about the world that are decoupled from the often-arbitrary rules and power structures that govern daily life. I’ll discuss J Li’s single player pervasive game “Twain”: a game whose central mechanic is to enlist a single player into believing for a moment in a past that is impossible. Twain invites players to briefly rewrite their own memories to include a fiction that can’t possibly be real, but which feels immediate and viscerally true within the experienced reality of the game. I’ll also consider the work of transgender game designer Avery Alder, who talks about this in terms of choosing to believe in the impossibilities. She argues that when the world is arranged to tell a story that robs you of any power, it is up to you to instead choose to tell yourself stories that restore that power. Much like J Li’s “Twain,” Alder’s games invite their players to inhabit alternative selves, as they move through their daily lives. I unpack this idea of play as a site for radical, emancipatory, identity work as a foundation for an emerging transformative game studies practice. I draw a connection between a constellation of allied theories and practices including, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiulo’s work on restorying, Jonaya Kemper’s work on emancipatory bleed, Jerome Bruner’s work on narrative as reality, Bernard Suits’ concept of a “lusory attitude”, Maya Deren’s writings about witchcraft and “successful deviants”, and my own work on design fiction, steampunk, and allohistorical fictional imaginaries. I take an explicitly autobiographical approach to these ideas, as a transgender woman, game designer, and practicing witch. In the spaces where these ideas intersect and overlap I see a seed to grow a trans game studies that doesn’t just “represent” trans people’s experiences, but instead recognizes how games, play, and story are entangled in the ways that we discover ourselves, confront and process our traumas, and defy the impossibilities imposed upon us by the oppressive normative social order.

You can book your free ticket here .

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Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research , Volume 4, Issue 3–4, pages 7–11.

Irma Hirsjärvi & Urpo Kovala

Two paths to fantasy studies.

Fantasy studies is a broad field as it is, and possible inroads to it, especially these days, are numerous. In what follows, we “look backwards” at how we ended up doing research on fantasy and its reception. Those paths are different but have crossed a few times. And at the end, we also look at other paths that are having their beginnings as we speak.

Irma Hirsjärvi (IH): I learned to read at the age of four. My literary appetite was voracious and I remember reading The Bible, a children’s picture dictionary, old Lutheran texts, and even The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – all this before I was six. When I interviewed Finnish sf fans for my doctoral thesis, they told me quite a similar story. Furthermore, many of them mentioned having become aware of this exceptional genre called science fiction through Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series. This was my case, too, when I read my first Mars book at the age of nine. However, in my doctoral dissertation (2009), it was also shown that reading habits are different with my generation and the younger ones, who have a narrower literary taste but who use the media more extensively. The difference between my generation and the younger ones is also visible in finding other fen. We only found each other as adults, through magazines and sf-clubs. The young today find their networks in childhood, through media.

Urpo Kovala (UK): As for me, I was never a fan of fantasy or sf in any strong sense of the term. I did read them, but hardly more than anyone else doing relatively much reading. The first book of my own was, I think, Peukaloisen retket ( Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige ) by Selma Lagerlöf. Later favourites were Winnie the Pooh , Gulliver’s Travels , Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Tiitiäisen satupuu ( The Tumpkin’s Wonder Tree ) by Kirsi Kunnas – and Asterix , which I’m still almost a fan of. Tolkien came up only in my student years, with e.g. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , which is one of my favourites. The focus has definitely been on older literature, although I did read some sf proper – Le Guin, Heinlein ja Asimov above all.

IH: It is interesting that I did not recognize in me the affective nature of a fan that was expressed in the interviews of the Finnish sf fans I later studied. I was really interested in sf, but not so much in the authors. Sf was fun, but not “all” sf. Then I accidentally met Kirsi Kunnas, the writer of that nursery rhyme book Tiitiäisen satupuu that you mentioned above, which was read to me as a kid, and which I had read to my kids and my grandchildren. This elderly lady was also the mother of two major Finnish rock musicians (in the band Eppu Normaali), and at the moment I saw her, the tender memories of reading the book, and the memories of the deeply meaningful (for me, obviously) rock music of her sons went through my mind, simultaneously, in a second. It literally wiped me off my feet, and really taught me a lesson about meaningful media relations.

Back to the years preceding the arrival of fandom studies in Finland. It was a time when feminist research was forbidden in our department, that of Comparative Literature, University of Jyväskylä. The early feminist scholars in the department were spreading the new ideas through reading groups and workshops, and I knew only a couple of seminar papers and one master’s thesis on sf or fantasy to have been done in Finland. We did translations of feminist texts and tried to read the works of J. R. R. Tolkien in English to be able to get any information about the things that we were so interested in. Thanks to Sirkka Heiskanen-Mäkelä we were able to form our own reading group around Tolkien and fantasy. Simultaneously I followed the activities of the amazing Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä. Under the leadership of professor Katarina Eskola the centre had created a wide network of cultural studies scholars, and it seemed to constantly have such interesting seminars and events, like the visit of the inspiring mass media researcher, professor James Lull.

All this (and several heated discussions around, e.g., the total absence of women in the lectures on symbolism in literature) encouraged me to suggest writing my MA thesis about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as a feminist utopia. Thanks to professor Sinikka Tuohimaa, the topic was accepted. After my graduation I was chosen to work in the Council of Central Finland to run EU projects on cultural tourism in Central Finland for four years. But time passed, and meanwhile Urpo was following the most interesting thingies…

UK: I got the very first impulse to launch fandom studies in the mid-90s, in a conference arranged at the then University of Joensuu in Finland. There Matti Savolainen, literary scholar, commented on the extensive reception studies presented there and asked – without using the term “fan” – couldn’t you, even for once, try and turn your gaze to special audiences, for instance those of horror literature? I thought – why not, as soon as I’m done with my PhD thesis, I’ll set up a project like that.

Actually I tried it out foolhardily long before defending my dissertation (which was a theoretical treatise on contextualism). In the early 1990s, I had spotted the rise of a new research orientation, fandom studies, and got access to a couple of books, at least Science Fiction Audiences by Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch. Aware of Irma’s active involvement in sf fandoms, I suggested launching together a research project in which she could take up a doctoral dissertation on sf fandom. We did write a research proposal, which however – understandably, from today’s perspective – did not get us any funding. It was almost ten years later that Irma could finally start her dissertation project in practice in 2003.

At around that same time, in 2002 and 2003, I edited the first Finnish-language textbook on fandom studies, a collection of articles called Kulttikirja (Cult book, SKS 2003), together with Tuija Saresma. For that volume, Irma wrote an article called “Star Trek phenomenon in the light of fandom studies” and I a theoretical piece on fandom research. A bit later Irma and I launched what would become a tradition of fandom studies conferences – the first one was arranged in 2006 and the latest to date in 2016 with the topic “the rise of nerd cultures”.

IH: As a single parent of two kids it was practically impossible to take up postgraduate studies until I got funded by The Finnish Cultural Foundation in 2003. That was practically a miracle. Our local sf society arranged a successful series of sf and fantasy events at the Jyväskylä Arts festivals, and we became an active agent in an international fandom network. During the first year of my PhD work, I was also involved in creating the Finncon Society, ensuring that the rising support of literary foundations for the society and the annual funding of the Ministry of Culture to the Annual Finncon-event (Finnish science fiction and fantasy convention) were administered properly. So I was simultaneously a member of the fandom family and doing my research on it. No wonder the international Aca-fan web pages felt like a familiar venue.

For me, sf has been a revolutionary genre, full of societal critique, but also the land of freedom, as a human and as a woman. Radical feminist groups landed in Finland in the early 80s, and I joined the activities. It must be said that it was from feminist research that I got the best kicks for research on reception. I ended up asking again and again what is audience, what is reception, how do readers and fandom and media intertwine, how do the power of the production machines, writer, and fandom converge, what do we talk about when we talk about culture, and whose culture? Now I see that when we wrote the first project proposal, there were no proper words yet to describe what we have later been doing, to make a convincing proposal.

UK: At the beginning of the so-called fantasy boom in the early years of the 21st century, the department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, arranged a lecture series on fantasy, which turned out to be a huge success. Partly on the basis of the lectures, Irma, Kristian Blomberg and me compiled a collection of essays and offered it to BTJ Kirjastopalvelu for publishing. The result was two volumes, Fantasian monet maailmat (Worlds of fantasy, 2004) and Totutun tuolla puolen (Fields of fantasy, 2005). The third volume, an English-language one, independent of the lecture series, was in the works, but was never finished.

A continuation of sorts, however, to those volumes and to the extensive reception and audience studies carried out at our homebase, Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, was the comparative research project “Young people reading fantasy”, which was part of the Baltic Ring project of the writers houses in the Baltic sea area, funded by the Culture 2000 programme. The project looked at the reception of one short story (“The Kerastion”) by Ursula Le Guin among secondary school students in six countries of the Baltic Sea region. There were one or more local researchers in each country – in Finland, Erkki Vainikkala and us two. As a natural continuation to this project, Irma received an invitation by Martin Barker to carry out the Finnish part of his extensive “World Hobbit Project” audience research project.

IH: While writing my PhD, I was shuttling between literary studies and youth, reception and media studies, and looked at the fandom phenomenon through meaning making, economy, reception, and social networking. In all of them, fantasy seemed to be a very interesting factor. The experiences in international sf fandom, fellow researchers of fantasy and my work in different projects have all influenced the way I see fantasy as an essential part of everyday life and society. During my PhD project – mostly funded by The Finnish Cultural Foundation – I was also funded by the Academy of Finland in professor Tuomo Lahdelma’s project “Cult – community – identity”. Later, I was a Finnish representative in European Union COST initiative “Transforming audiences, transforming societies”, and a researcher and coordinator of the comparative “Global Comparative Youth Media Participation” project, which was led by Professor Sirkku Kotilainen and included researchers from Finland, Egypt, India, and Argentina. This has all been instructive and even transformative for me, but I wish to be able to return to utopias, as they are a hot topic just now, in this long dystopian time. Keijo Lakkala is currently editing a collection of articles on utopias and I wish to contribute to the volume.

During the last years the most demanding job has been the almost three years long attempt to get funding for the Finnish researchers in the “World Hobbit Project” led by Professor Martin Barker at the University of Aberystwyth. The funding for the Finnish sub-project “Uses of Fantasy” was garnered from The Finnish Cultural Foundation and the scholars funded were Tanja Välisalo, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Maria Ruotsalainen, Jyrki Korpua and me, with Urpo Kovala, Jani Ylönen ja Minna Siikilä taking part as non-funded members. As a consequence of our participation in that project, we are also in in Barker’s next global “Game of Thrones Research Project”.

The GoT project is really something else. Fantasy is characterised by a strong livedness, and in the past few decades, also with adults, a clearly articulated fandom. One might think that the global fantasy media spectacles started with Star Wars , which was enhancedly subcultural and a thing for children, youngsters, and nerds. But that is not the whole story. Due to the new media, the Lord of the Rings trilogy had a global online audience, and following that phenomenon gave us old fans/fan researchers some extra heartbeat. At the same time in Finland there was this rapidly emerging anime thing with dressing up and hoards of fans. It was actually introduced here in Finland by sf fans – and eventually turned the field of the Finnish fantasy fandom upside down. Now we have ended up in a situation where it is almost a routine thing to set up a multidisciplinary research project on the reception or audiences of a global fantasy text.

Along with the media spectacles, there is a renewed need to understand the audiences and reception of fantasy, not the least because of the participatory cultures connected with it. What we need is basic research – cases on which to ground fandom theory. Thinking about Barker’s projects on the audiences of the two Tolkien trilogies and now GoT , it feels like we are facing something new. They allow us to combine the study of transnational audiences, the use of widely different materials, and qualitative and quantitative research.

UK: Of us two, I think I am the brakeman – irritatingly suspicious of hard-and-fast generalisations, a priori conclusions, and anything even vaguely reminiscent of hype. Fantasy, as any genre, has multiple determinations, and fantasy studies, as any research, require a degree of perspectivism – just as you suggest above. I also agree that the main “affordance” of these genres has to do with the indirect representation and analysis of contemporary society. My main interest is perhaps in the meaning production aspect in the reception of fantasy and the cultural functions of fantasy. These things, among many others, are looked at in the “World Hobbit Project” and the “Game of Thrones Research Project” led by Martin Barker and others. But in addition to exciting and fruitful contextualisations, it is important to keep the analysis of devices and resources of expression in the picture as well.

IH: Finfar, the Finnish Society of Science Fiction and Fantasy Researcher, founded in 2013, and the refereed journal Fafnir that it publishes, together constitute a significant turning point in the Finnish field of fantasy studies. Science fiction activist Juri Timonen’s offer to make a website for the society (made in the night out of the Helsinki Finncon) was pondered on for a moment, and after I phoned professor emerita Liisa Rantalaiho and researcher Merja Polvinen, the plan for setting up the society was made. The founding meeting was held in Tampere in 2013. The society started to gather together young researchers into yearly seminars and supported their activities and international mobility.

It has indeed been inspiring to follow the careers of a whole legion of promising fantasy researchers. For instance Sanna Lehtonen’s (now Tapionkaski) doctoral dissertation and her studies on fantasy literature for children and youth were of high international quality from the first beginning. Together with Jyväskylä “nerd scholars” and a number of games studies scholars, these researchers now constitute something of a new school of fantasy research of their own. Our research group taking part in the “World Hobbit Project” produced perhaps the most insightful analysis in the project, based on the Finnish materials. Jyrki Korpua, who defended his doctoral thesis on J. R .R. Tolkien in 2015, is now editing a collection of articles on fantasy research, aimed for the general audience, together with Tanja Välisalo, Urpo, and me. Both Jyrki and Tanja, who is expert in transmediality, game studies, and the furry phenomenon, were part of the Hobbit project as well. Maria Ruotsalainen comes from game studies and her cup of tea is web analysis, and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen focuses on media and popular culture, science fiction (especially in TV series), gender studies, and posthumanism.

The Finnish sub-project of the “World Hobbit Project” also includes Minna Siikilä, who is doing her doctoral dissertation on the Internet debates over the intertextual relations between Tolkien, Rowling, and Paolini, and Jani Ylönen, who is writing his PhD thesis on the issues of humanity, ethics, and societal critique aroused by gene technology in contemporary science fiction. Comics research is in the picture as well, with two scholars who work with comics at our department. Katja Kontturi defended her doctoral thesis on Disney comics as postmodern fantasy in 2014, Essi Varis is doing her dissertation on comics characters, and Oskari Rantala is writing his thesis on the narrative techniques and medial self-awareness of Alan Moore’s comics. The list of topics covered by these scholars illustrates well the versatility of contemporary fantasy and Finnish science fiction studies: science fiction, feminist posthumanism, gene technology, gender, dogs, ethics, monster theory, representation…

IH and UK: Looking at young fantasy scholars in Jyväskylä and elsewhere, it would not seem all that far-fetched to speak of a new generation of fantasy studies. That generation would be characterised above all by multidisciplinarity, interest in inter- and transmediality, the use of many different kinds of research materials, and a focus on the multiaspectuality of fantasy and its potential for cultural critique. The approach has extended far beyond aesthetic analysis, in a narrow sense of the term, to include versatile, theoretically informed contextualisation. Theoretical horizons increasingly consist of new materialism and posthumanism as well as feminist approaches. Genres studied cover not only fiction but also games, movies, comics, and metatexts such as Internet discussions. Accounts of reception, fandom, and consumption are often combined with analyses of productional aspects. Methodwise, digital information gathering and combinations of qualitative and quantitative data are typical.

Fantasy is thus studied in connection with the material world, including market economy with its forces and counter-forces, and even advertising does not escape the critical and analytical gaze. This new generation of scholars, it seems, can both identify as and study (fantasy) fans and nerds without having to do the apologetics of the first generation of fandom scholars.

It has been exciting and rewarding for both of us to follow this new phase. Just like fictional heroes – and now you have to excuse a degree of pomp – have evolved from adventurous hulks to thinking human beings, fantasy scholars have come out from the margins and entered the avant garde of the human sciences.

Biographies : Dr Irma Hirsjärvi is an independent scholar in connection with Research Centre for Contemporary Culture projects. She is one of the founding members of Finfar, member of the editorial board of the publication series Nykykulttuuri (Contemporary Culture), columnist and politician. Her PhD was about the literary community of science fiction fans, and she has worked in several EU cultural and research projects as researcher and coordinator. Her interests are in science fiction and its audiences, fandom, activism, political populism, and feminist utopias.

Dr. and docent Urpo Kovala works as Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. He is member of the advisory board for Fafnir and editor in charge of the publication series Nykykulttuuri (Contemporary Culture). His earlier research interests were in the areas of theory of meaning, contextualism, and cultural translation studies. His present work has to do with reception and fandom studies, fantasy, and the study of cultural discourses and rhetoric in connection with populism and activism.

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Ph.d. in literature.

Our PhD students are involved in a range of interdisciplinary and public initiatives. For example, some affiliate with interdisciplinary  Designated Emphases ; others have received grants to create  podcasts , convene interdisciplinary  working groups , or organize and annual graduate student conferences . Each year one student participates in a year-long exchange program with the  Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies  in Mainz, Germany; some have worked as Graduate Assistants and researchers for research centers such as the  Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program , the experimental media  Modlab , and the university’s  Datalab .

Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for professional research and teaching in English, as well as extensive pedagogical training and a range of teaching experience that includes writing and composition, as well as designing and teaching Introduction to Literature courses. Our Alumni Directory  includes titles of recent dissertations, as well as information about the diverse careers for which the PhD has helped prepare our graduates. There is an option to complete an MA in literature , but it is not a stand-alone program.

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• Students may count one undergraduate 100-level course as one of their ten required courses.
• Aside from ENL 200, no course graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory may count as one of the twelve required seminars. Independent and group studies may not be taken for a grade.

13 Total Graduate Courses (50 units; 44 units taken for a grade)  Additionally, students who enter the Ph.D. program without a MA degree can earn one en route to the Ph.D. degree.

The English Ph.D. requires a reading knowledge of one foreign language before completing the degree; it is not an admissions requirement. This could be satisfied through previous or current coursework or an exam. Any of the following demonstrates proficiency:

Completion within the past eight years of 3 semester-length, or 4 quarter-length courses in a foreign language at the undergraduate level. Students must earn a passing grade, but courses may be taken on a Pass/No Pass basis.

Students may take the Placement Test offered by the UC Davis Language Center , testing out of the language at the intermediate level.

A Pass in the language exam offered in the English Department at the beginning of Fall or Spring quarter each year.

The breadth requirements must be fulfilled by coursework in the Department of English or coursework taught by English Department faculty.  Five courses (of the total 40 units above) will satisfy this requirement. Students must complete two Earlier Period courses, and two Later Period courses, and one Focus course. 

Earlier Period Courses Pre-1800; or Pre-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Later Period Courses post-1800; or post-1865 if the course focus is on American literature

Focus Course Interdisciplinary, Identity, Genre, Other National, Method, Theory

Faculty and/or the Graduate Advisor may choose to designate a course as fulfilling more than one category, but students may use the course to fulfill only one requirement. For instance, a student could use a course on women in Early Modern literature to satisfy the Earlier Period requirement, or the Focus (Identity) requirement, but not both. A student could use a course on Cold War Drama to satisfy the Later Period requirement or the Focus (Genre) requirement, but not both.

The electives requirement can be fulfilled by actual offered seminars inside or outside the English Department.  Five elective courses will satisfy degree requirements. UWP 390 is acceptable as one of the electives. Also, be aware 299s are ungraded but still count towards overall units. With the approval of the Graduate Adviser, students may also enroll in a graduate class at another University of California campus through the Intercampus Exchange Program .

Students who enter the Ph.D. program with MA coursework from another institution may petition the Graduate Adviser for a Course Waiver up to three of the twelve required seminars; each approved petition will reduce the number of required courses by one. Students may not reduce their coursework to fewer than nine seminars.

Students holding an MA may also petition the Graduate Adviser for course relief for up to five of the breadth requirements; each approved petition allows the student to substitute elective courses. ENL 200 may not be waived or relieved.

For each waiver or relief request, students must submit to the English Graduate Office a Course Waiver or Relief Request form (available in the office) along with the syllabus from the course and the student's seminar paper.

Graduate students may participate in a Designated Emphasis (DE) , a specialization that might include a new method of inquiry or an important field of application which is related to two or more existing Ph.D. programs. The DE is awarded in conjunction with the Ph.D. degree and is signified by a transcript notation; for example, “Ph.D. in Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Native American Studies.”  More information .

In the Spring Quarter of the second year or Fall Quarter of the third year of graduate study, students take a Preliminary Examination in two historical fields and one focus field. Three faculty members conduct the oral examination, each representing one of the fields. Prior to taking the Preliminary Examination, students must have completed the following:

Introduction to Graduate Studies (ENL200)

Survey of Literary Theory (CRI200A or CRI200C)

Four of five Breadth Requirements

Four of five Elective Requirements

Additionally, students select one focus field. A student may devise her/his own focus list in collaboration with two faculty members or, as is more common, choose one from among the following:

Black Studies

Critical Theory

Disability Studies

Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities

Film Studies

Media Technologies

Performance Studies

Postcolonial Theory

Psychoanalysis

Queer Feminisms

Queer Theories

Race and Ethnicity Studies

Science and Literature

Science Fiction

English 299 (Independent Study) is ordinarily used the quarters before the Preliminary Examination to prepare for the oral  examination and is graded Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory. Students may register for ENL 299 under the Graduate Advisor or a faculty member in the field of their exam for the quarter(s) they intend to study.

In the event that the student does not pass the exam, the exam chair will report the decision to the Graduate Adviser, who will work with the committee to decide whether the student should be given a chance to retake the exam (no less than six months later) or whether the student should be dismissed from the program. The Graduate Adviser will report this final decision to the student within 72 hours of the exam’s conclusion.

Any remaining requirements after taking the Preliminary Examination must be completed before scheduling the Qualifying Examination.

Students will select two historical fields from among the following list.   Students who would like to do non-consecutive historical fields need to get prior approval from the Graduate Adviser.  These lists and additional helpful documents can be accessed via our box folder "Preliminary Exam" in the English Graduate Program file.

The Qualifying Examination  happens as early as the spring of the third year and should be taken no later than the spring of the fourth year . The reading list for this exam, which is conducted orally, is constructed by the student in consultation with his or her three-person dissertation committee. When making their lists, students may consult the standard lists for preliminary exams available on the department's Box site. If the student has elected a designated emphasis (DE), materials from that field should also be incorporated into the Qualifying Exam reading list.

Graduate Studies requires the Qualifying Examination Application (GS319) to be submitted at least 30 days prior the the scheduled exam date.

Qualifying Examination Committee  The student, in consultation with their Prospectus Adviser and, if needed, the Graduate Adviser, nominates  four   faculty to serve on the Qualifying Examination Committee: 

• The three proposed Dissertation Committee members 
• One member must be from outside the English graduate program (this may be a member of the Dissertation Committee). 

The QE Committee is responsible for administering the exam. Neither the “Prospectus Adviser” nor the Dissertation Director (in many, though not all, cases these will be same) may be the chair of the QE Committee. Students with a designated emphasis (DE) must include one faculty member affiliated with the DE on both their qualifying and dissertation committee. DE paperwork must be approved before the QE application is submitted. The exam will focus on the Prospectus and the Qualifying Exam reading list. The bibliography of the prospectus will normally overlap substantially with the Qualifying Exam reading list.

The Qualifying Exam Report (GS343) must be submitted withing 72 hours of the exam. Upon successful completion, students receive the Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Plan B (GS321) .

If you are disabled, you are entitled to accommodations for all requirements of the program you’re enrolled in, a process formally handled by the Student Disability Center . We recommend starting the process of coordinating with the SDC early in your graduate school journey, as it can take time for the Center to process information.  We must work with the SDC to implement your accommodations for your exams.  Please indicate your need for accommodations to us as soon as possible, so we can include the Center in our exam scheduling process.  Please notify us by the fourth week of the quarter in which you intend to sit the exam.

The dissertation must be an original work of scholarship and/or interpretation. It may be critical, bibliographical, historical, or biographical in its subject. Students work with a dissertation director and consult with two official readers as well as with other faculty knowledgeable about the project. A dditional details . 

PhD Program in English Language and Literature

The department enrolls an average of ten PhD students each year. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package. We also offer a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical and cultural fields. Each student chooses a special committee that works closely along side the student to design a course of study within the very broad framework established by the department. The program is extremely flexible in regard to course selection, the design of examinations and the election of minor subjects of concentration outside the department. English PhD students pursuing interdisciplinary research may include on their special committees faculty members from related fields such as comparative literature, medieval studies, Romance studies, German studies, history, classics, women’s studies, linguistics, theatre and performing arts, government, philosophy, and film and video studies.

The PhD candidate is normally expected to complete six or seven one-semester courses for credit in the first year of residence and a total of six or seven more in the second and third years. The program of any doctoral candidate’s formal and informal study, whatever his or her particular interests, should be comprehensive enough to ensure familiarity with:

• The authors and works that have been the most influential in determining the course of English, American, and related literatures
• The theory and criticism of literature, and the relations between literature and other disciplines
• Concerns and tools of literary and cultural history such as textual criticism, study of genre, source, and influence as well as wider issues of cultural production and historical and social contexts that bear on literature

Areas in which students may have major or minor concentrations include African-American literature, American literature to 1865, American literature after 1865, American studies (a joint program with the field of history), colonial and postcolonial literatures, cultural studies, dramatic literature, English poetry, the English Renaissance to 1660, lesbian, bisexual and gay literary studies, literary criticism and theory, the nineteenth century, Old and Middle English, prose fiction, the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the twentieth century, and women's literature.

By the time a doctoral candidate enters the fourth semester of graduate study, the special committee must decide whether he or she is qualified to proceed toward the PhD. Students are required to pass their Advancement to Candidacy Examination before their fourth year of study, prior to the dissertation.

PhD Program specifics can be viewed here: PhD Timeline PhD Procedural Guide

Special Committee

Every graduate student selects a special committee of faculty advisors who work intensively with the student in selecting courses and preparing and revising the dissertation. The committee is comprised of at least three Cornell faculty members: a chair, and typically two minor members usually from the English department, but very often representing an interdisciplinary field. The university system of special committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework established by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The special committee for each student guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress in a series of meetings with the students.

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training in academia. The field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience of at least one year for every doctoral candidate as part of the program requirements. The Department of English, in conjunction with the  John S. Knight Institute for Writing  in the Disciplines, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare,” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of English faculty.

Language Requirements

Each student and special committee will decide what work in foreign language is most appropriate for a student’s graduate program and scholarly interests. Some students’ doctoral programs require extensive knowledge of a single foreign language and literature; others require reading ability in two or more foreign languages. A student may be asked to demonstrate competence in foreign languages by presenting the undergraduate record, taking additional courses in foreign languages and literature, or translating and discussing documents related to the student’s work. Students are also normally expected to provide evidence of having studied the English language through courses in Old English, the history of the English language, grammatical analysis or the application of linguistic study to metrics or to literary criticism. Several departments at Cornell offer pertinent courses in such subjects as descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language.

All PhD degree candidates are guaranteed five years of funding (including a stipend , a full tuition fellowship and student health insurance):

• A first-year non-teaching fellowship
• Two years of teaching assistantships
• A fourth-year non-teaching fellowship for the dissertation writing year
• A fifth-year teaching assistantship
• Summer support for four years, including a first-year summer teaching assistantship, linked to a teachers’ training program at the Knight Institute. Summer residency in Ithaca is required.

Students have also successfully competed for Buttrick-Crippen Fellowship, Society for the Humanities Fellowships, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Shin Yong-Jin Graduate Fellowships, Provost’s Diversity Fellowships, fellowships in recognition of excellence in teaching, and grants from the Graduate School to help with the cost of travel to scholarly conferences and research collections.

Admission & Application Procedures

The application for Fall 2024 admission will open on September 15, 2023 and close at 11:59pm EST on December 1, 2023.

Our application process reflects the field’s commitment to considering the whole person and their potential to contribute to our scholarly community.  Applicants will be evaluated on the basis of academic preparation (e.g., performance in relevant courses, completion of substantive, independent research project). An applicant’s critical and creative potential will be considered: applicants should demonstrate interest in extensive research and writing and include a writing sample that reveals a capacity to argue persuasively, demonstrate the ability to synthesize a broad range of materials, as well as offer fresh insights into a problem or text. The committee will also consider whether an applicant demonstrates a commitment to inclusion, equity, and diversity and offers a substantive explanation for why study at Cornell is especially compelling (e.g., a discussion of faculty research and foci). Admissions committees will consider the entire application carefully, including statements and critical writing, as well as transcripts, letters of recommendation, and a resume/cv (if provided). Please view the requirements and procedures listed below, if you are interested in being considered for our PhD in English Language and Literature program.

Eligibility: Applicants must currently have, or expect to have, at least a BA or BS (or the equivalent) in any field before matriculation. International students, please verify degree equivalency here . Applicants are not required to meet a specified GPA minimum.

To Apply: All applications and supplemental materials must be submitted online through the Graduate School application system . While completing your application, you may save and edit your data. Once you click submit, your application will be closed for changes. Please proofread your materials carefully. Once you pay and click submit, you will not be able to make any changes or revisions.

Deadline: December 1st, 11:59pm EST.  This deadline is firm. No applications, additional materials, or revisions will be accepted after the deadline.

PhD Program Application Requirements Checklist

• Academic Statement of Purpose Please describe (within 1000 words) in detail the substantive research questions you are interested in pursuing during your graduate studies and why they are significant. Additionally, make sure to include information about any training or research experience that you believe has prepared you for our program. You should also identify specific faculty members whose research interests align with your own specific questions.  Note that the identification of faculty is important; you would be well advised to read selected faculty’s recent scholarship so that you can explain why you wish to study with them. Do not rely on the courses they teach.  Please refrain from contacting individual faculty prior to receiving an offer of admission.
• Personal Statement Please describe (within 1000 words) how your personal background and experiences influenced your decision to pursue a graduate degree and the research you wish to conduct.  Explain, for example the meaning and purpose of the PhD in the context of your personal history and future aspirations.  Please note that we will pay additional attention to candidates who identify substantial reasons to obtain a PhD beyond the pursuit of an academic position. Additionally, provide insight into your potential to contribute to a community of inclusion, belonging, and respect where scholars representing diverse backgrounds, perspectives, abilities, and experiences can learn (productively and positively) together.
• Critical Writing Sample Your academic writing sample must be between 3,000 and 7,500 words (12-30 pages), typed and double-spaced. We accept excerpts from longer works, or a combination of shorter works.
• Three Letters of Recommendation We require 3 letters of recommendation.  At the time of application, you will be allowed to enter up to 4 recommenders in the system.  Your application will be considered “Complete” when we have received at least 3 letters of recommendation.   Letters of recommendation are due December 1 . Please select three people who best know you and your work. Submitting additional letters will not enhance your application. In the recommendation section of the application, you must include the email address of each recommender. After you save the information (and before you pay/submit), the application system will automatically generate a recommendation request email to your recommender with instructions for submitting the letter electronically. If your letters are stored with a credential service such as Interfolio, please use their Online Application Delivery feature and input the email address assigned to your stored document, rather than that of your recommender’s. The electronic files will be attached to your application when they are received and will not require the letter of recommendation cover page.
• Transcripts Scan transcripts from each institution you have attended, or are currently attending, and upload into the academic information section of the application. Be sure to remove your social security number from all documents prior to scanning. Please do not send paper copies of your transcripts. If you are subsequently admitted and accept, the Graduate School will require an official paper transcript from your degree-awarding institution prior to matriculation.
• English Language Proficiency Requirement All applicants must provide proof of English language proficiency. For more information, please view the  Graduate School’s English Language Requirement .
• GRE General Test and GRE Subject Test are NO LONGER REQUIRED, effective starting with the 2019 application In March 2019, the faculty of English voted overwhelmingly to eliminate all GRE requirements (both general and subject test) for application to the PhD program in English. GRE scores are not good predictors of success or failure in a PhD program in English, and the uncertain predictive value of the GRE exam is far outweighed by the toll it takes on student diversity. For many applicants the cost of preparing for and taking the exam is prohibitively expensive, and the exam is not globally accessible. Requiring the exam narrows our applicant pool at precisely the moment we should be creating bigger pipelines into higher education. We need the strength of a diverse community in order to pursue the English Department’s larger mission: to direct the force of language toward large and small acts of learning, alliance, imagination, and justice.

General Information for All Applicants

Application Fee: Visit the Graduate School for information regarding application fees, payment options, and fee waivers .

Document Identification: Please do not put your social security number on any documents.

Status Inquiries:  Once you submit your application, you will receive a confirmation email. You will also be able to check the completion status of your application in your account. If vital sections of your application are missing, we will notify you via email after the Dec. 1 deadline and allow you ample time to provide the missing materials. Please do not inquire about the status of your application.

Credential/Application Assessments:  The Admission Review Committee members are unable to review application materials or applicant credentials prior to official application submission. Once the committee has reviewed applications and made admissions decisions, they will not discuss the results or make any recommendations for improving the strength of an applicant’s credentials. Applicants looking for feedback are advised to consult with their undergraduate advisor or someone else who knows them and their work.

Review Process:  Application review begins after the submission deadline. Notification of admissions decisions will be made by email by the end of February.

Connecting with Faculty and/or Students: Unfortunately, due to the volume of inquiries we receive, faculty and current students are not available to correspond with potential applicants prior to an offer of admission. Applicants who are offered admission will have the opportunity to meet faculty and students to have their questions answered prior to accepting. Staff and faculty are also not able to pre-assess potential applicant’s work outside of the formal application process. Please email [email protected] instead, if you have questions.

Visiting: The department does not offer pre-admission visits or interviews. Admitted applicants will be invited to visit the department, attend graduate seminars and meet with faculty and students before making the decision to enroll.

Transfer Credits:  Students matriculating with an MA degree may, at the discretion of the Director of Graduate Studies, receive credit for up to two courses once they begin our program.

For Further Information

Contact [email protected]

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Doctor of Philosophy in Literature

Program description.

The graduate program in literature brings together scholars, creative writers and translators who share a commitment to transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to literary study and practice. The PhD in literature provides students with a flexible context in which to pursue research across a wide range of literary traditions, critical approaches and theoretical debates. In addition to coursework in literary studies, students have the opportunity to participate in creative writing and/or literary translation workshops as well as seminars in other disciplines, such as film studies, the history of ideas, philosophy and the visual and performing arts.

Students pursuing the PhD in literature may, if their coursework supports it, submit a translation or creative writing project as part of their dissertation.

Career Opportunities

Graduates of the program seek positions such as: teacher/educator, writer, editor, publisher, translator and critic. Career settings may include higher education, nonprofits, cultural and historical organizations, publishing houses, government agencies, international development organizations, museums and archives, business/corporate entities and independent consulting.

Marketable Skills

Review the marketable skills for this academic program.

Application Requirements

Visit the  Apply Now  webpage to begin the application process.  

Applicants to the Doctoral degree program should have:  

• A baccalaureate degree (BA or MA) or its equivalent from an accredited institution of higher education, normally in an arts and humanities field.  
• Letters of Recommendation: Applicants must submit 3 letters of recommendation from faculty, or other individuals, able to judge the candidate’s potential for success in the program.  
• Admissions Essay: Applicants must submit a 650-word narrative essay, which should be reflective rather than factual. The essay should address the applicant’s academic interests and goals and indicate how the program would enable such pursuits.  
• A writing sample: Submit an academic writing sample (e.g., a seminar paper or a critical essay). 
• International applicants must submit a TOEFL score of at least 80 on the internet-based test.  Scores must be less than two years old. See the  Graduate Catalog  for additional information regarding English proficiency requirements for international applicants.  
• Each application is considered holistically on its individual merits. You must submit all supporting documents before the Graduate Admissions Committee can review your application. 
• The Graduate Record Examination is not required. 

Deadline:  The application deadline is January 15. All applications completed by the deadline will be reviewed for admission. Applications submitted or completed after January 15 may be reviewed for admission only if spaces remain within the upcoming cohort and will be reviewed in order by the date the application file became complete.

Contact Information

Literature Graduate Programs Email: [email protected]

Dr. Charles Hatfield Associate Professor and Program Head Phone: 972-883-2780 Email: [email protected]

Graduate Advising Pia K. Jakobsson Phone: 972-883-4706 Email: [email protected]

Graduate Admissions Phone: 972-883-6176 Email: [email protected] Request Bass School Graduate Program Information

Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology The University of Texas at Dallas, JO31 800 W. Campbell Road Richardson, TX 75080-3021

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PhD Admissions

Dates and Deadline

The online application for 2024 entry will open in mid-September. Check the  Apply Now  page to see when it is open. The  APPLICATION DUE DATE for the entering class of 2024 is December 5, 2023 at 11:59 PM PST

What You Need to Know

• The application, including the statement of purpose, the writing sample, the names of three recommenders, and unofficial transcripts must be submitted  VIA THE WEB.  Late applications will not be accepted.
• The Stanford Application will be available as of late September.
• Do not wait until the last day to submit your application to allow for the possibility for technical difficulties. 
• Please make sure to include an unofficial transcript in your application materials. Official transcripts are not required until an offer of admission is made.  
• The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) is not required.
• Interfolio letters of recommendation may be sent by email to An Nguyen ( antnguyn [at] stanford.edu (antnguyn[at]stanford[dot]edu) ).
• Admissions decisions will take place during the last two weeks of February.
• Applicants will be notified by early March.

The selection of PhD students admitted to the Program in Modern Thought & Literature is based on an individualized, holistic review of each application, including (but not limited to) the applicant’s academic record, the letters of recommendation, the statement of purpose, personal qualities and characteristics, and past accomplishments.

The Program in Modern Thought and Literature recognizes that the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June 2023 about the consideration of certain types of demographic information as part of an admission review. All applications submitted during upcoming application cycles will be reviewed in conformance with that decision.

Application Procedure

The Program in Modern Thought and Literature seeks to admit students who, as individuals, exhibit great intellectual capacity and the intent to carry out innovative interdisciplinary programs of study, and who, as a group, are of diverse backgrounds and interests. Successful applicants show a commitment to literary or cultural studies, but must also be prepared to make their way in their chosen non-literary field or fields. The Program has a commitment to supporting non-traditional and emergent forms of scholarship. We accept students who have just completed their undergraduate degrees and also welcome students who have pursued careers or degrees in other fields.

An application to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature must include the following elements:

Statement of Purpose

• Supplemental section regarding your proposed interdisciplinary project

Writing Sample

• Letters of Recommendation

To apply for admission, please go to Graduate Admissions

To reach Graduate Admissions, please submit a ticket using the help section of your application in the SLATE portal.

Of primary importance, the  statement of purpose  should demonstrate that the applicant’s focus is interdisciplinary and can be effectively pursued at Stanford.  You should suggest a project or two that would provide a sense of how you wish to pursue interdisciplinary study, and why the Program in Modern Thought and Literature is a good fit for you.  Although there is no hard and fast requirement regarding length, the Statement of Purpose should be a concise description of your academic goals,  no longer than 1500 words.

Supplemental section

In addition to the statement of purpose, you will be asked to complete a supplemental section regarding your proposed interdisciplinary project. 

Because they must forge links among disciplines and seek out relevant faculty members from across the university, students in Modern Thought and Literature need to develop their projects earlier than students in more traditional fields. Applicants should also bear in mind that the academic job market is overwhelmingly discipline-focused. Please answer the following questions BRIEFLY (2-3 sentences for each) to indicate that you’ve considered these issues. It’s of course assumed that your project will change and evolve as you study; this is in no way a binding statement of purpose. (*All three questions are required.)

1. What is the central question you intend to pursue?

2. Describe the need for an interdisciplinary approach.

3. Explain the relevance of your project to at least one discipline or field within which you could situate yourself upon completion of your doctoral degree.

Similar issues should be addressed by those not planning to pursue an academic career. Where do you see your project taking you?

Submit a critical or analytic sample of scholarly writing, approximately  7000 words maximum . Although we encourage applicants to choose writing samples that display their interdisciplinary interests, this is not a requirement. Choose a sample that reflects your best scholarly work. The writing sample should not be a sample of creative writing. Applicants may submit two or more shorter samples to a total of about 7000 words, but keep in mind that shorter samples are usually less well suited to demonstrate your research and argumentation skills.

The writing sample and letters of recommendation should again indicate your preparedness for interdisciplinary work, and why your interests would be best served in a program such as ours.

Completed applications must be submitted by the due date above.

Knight-Hennessy Scholars 

Join dozens of  Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences students  who gain valuable leadership skills in a multidisciplinary, multicultural community as  Knight-Hennessy Scholars (KHS). KHS admits up to 100 select applicants each year from across Stanford’s seven graduate schools, and delivers engaging experiences that prepare them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders ready to address complex global challenges. As a scholar, you join a distinguished cohort, participate in up to three years of leadership programming, and receive full funding for up to three years of your PhD studies at Stanford. Candidates of any country may apply. KHS applicants must have earned their first undergraduate degree within the last seven years, and must apply to both a Stanford graduate program and to KHS. Stanford PhD students may also apply to KHS during their first year of PhD enrollment. If you aspire to be a leader in your field, we invite you to apply. The KHS application deadline is October 11, 2023. Learn more about  KHS admission .

Program Administrator

An Nguyen  (for questions about the application process) E-mail: antnguyn [at] stanford.edu (antnguyn[at]stanford[dot]edu)  

Modern Thought and Literature 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 460, Room 219 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2022

Only On-Line Applications Will be Accepted

Please note: there is no paper option for applications. All applications must be submitted online. Letters of recommendation should also be submitted online. Modern Thought & Literature will accept letters by mail only in exceptional cases and when absolutely necessary.  Your Statement of Purpose, your Writing Sample, and your Unofficial Transcripts must be uploaded with your online application. 

• University application forms (submitted online)
• A statement of purpose (submitted online)
• Transcripts from every post-secondary institution you have attended for at least one year as a full-time student (submitted online; official transcripts mailed to address below )*
• Three letters of recommendation (although we much prefer that the letters of recommendation will be submitted online, we will accept mailed letters when necessary); recommendation packets sent through Interfolio may be sent via email to An Nguyen ( antnguyn [at] stanford.edu (antnguyn[at]stanford[dot]edu) ).
• A recent (non-fiction) writing sample of approximately 7000 words.  PLEASE NOTE:  The Writing Sample must be submitted online. 
• Fee waivers are available for some applicants. Please visit Graduate Admissions for information on applying for an  Application Fee Waiver
• Application Fee Fee waivers are available for some applicants. Please visit Graduate Admissions for information on applying for an  Application Fee Waiver .
• Funding Package All Ph.D. students admitted to the program receive five years of 12-month financial support which is typically provided as fellowship stipend and tuition. Information about the cost of attendance and funding options are available from  Financial Aid Office . For Incoming Students
• Status Page : Where incoming students can find their matriculation checklist and Graduate Admissions mailing and email address for sending official documents.
• Official Transcripts & Degree Conferral Documents : Complete instructions for sending official documents.
• FAQ : Answers to frequently asked questions on requirements of admission for incoming students.

To access the MTL Applicant Checklist (after you have submitted your application), go to: https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/applying/starting-your-application

• Check the agreement box and click “start application.”
• At the bottom of the menu on the next screen you’ll find:  Manage Your Account
• Choose “Review Your Activity” and to access the checklist.

Please Note:  Do not be concerned if the checklist indicates that your application is not complete due to missing official scores or official transcripts.

For the review process:

• “Self-reported” scores are acceptable.
• The uploaded “unofficial” transcripts are acceptable.

However, before any formal offer of admission can be made, official scores and official transcripts must be submitted.

Links for international applicants

• Stanford’s assessment of foreign degrees https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/applying/international-applicants
• Frequently Asked Questions https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/about/frequently-asked-questions/international-students
• Required Examinations Most international students must take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).  Information on the required tests (including information on exemptions from the TOEFL requirement) can be found at: https://gradadmissions.stanford.edu/about/frequently-asked-questions/gre-and-toefl
• Information for international students at Stanford Visit the Bechtel International Center site: https://bechtel.stanford.edu/
• Fee waivers are available for some applicants. Please visit Graduate Admissions for information on applying for an  Application Fee Waiver .

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Fantasy Literature and the Great War

The following proposal was accepted for the 2018 Center for Vision and Values conference.

Fantasy Literature and the Great War:

The response of j. r. r. tolkien, c. s. lewis, and lord dunsany.

It is an understatement to say World War I, or the Great War as it was known before the Second World War, was like no other prior war. Trench warfare was horrifically gory, and the resulting war of attrition was ghastly in its necessary reduction of the human soldier to a mere machine of war numbered among millions of other expendable human military machines. This “Great War,” a most ironic and tragic misnomer, profoundly affected Western socio-political realities and cultural production for decades. The West, indeed the world, would never be the same.

Artists, musicians, poets, essayists, novelists, and dramatists reacted in diverse and profound ways to the horrific realities of this war that was supposed to end all wars. The early twentieth century, for the West, was marked by an unflinching optimism in the progress of science, economics, and culture. National pride and colonial nationalism were at a fever pitch. Notions of patriotism, nationalism, and military heroism were idealistic, noble, and inspiring. When war broke out, many believed this optimistic patriotic idealism would carry the day. As the war dragged on and millions lost their lives and millions others were wounded in battle, early twentieth-century idealism and optimism transformed into existential crisis, horror, disillusionment, apathy, and, in some cases, despair.

The existing cultural norms and artistic tropes no longer made sense considering the existential horror of the First World War. A revolution in literary production took place, giving rise to experimental fiction that privileged the emotional, the descriptive, the subjective, and the psychological, and the preferred literary form was realism. Various cultural grand narratives began to be challenged, and the local, subjective perspectives were privileged. Such literary transformations would be exasperated by the Second World War, giving rise to what was eventually labelled postmodernism.

However, during these anxious post-WW I literary revolutions and artistic crises existed a small group of intellectuals and writers who chose to respond in a radically different and counter-cultural way. These curious writers rejected cynical realism and relativistic subjectivism and embraced, instead, a visionary and even idealistic mythic perspective. Instead of dismissing ancient literary traditions as no longer relevant and even inadequate to capturing the contemporary dispirited spirit of the age, these writers purposely and intentionally invoked epic narrative, quest romance tales, and fantastical myth as literary means to address the intellectual, spiritual, and existential concerns of post-war society.

Mythopoeic fantasy, for these writers, served not as mindless escapism but, rather, functioned as a corrective to spiritually empty and culturally bankrupt realism. In this paper, I will examine how such veterans of WW I as Lord Dunsany, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis wrote mythopoeic fantasy literature as a means of questioning post-war cynicism, challenging the assumptions of materialism, and providing a corrective to the moral and spiritual malaise common in early twentieth-century realist literature.

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• Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition

Universities with good professors in Fantasy and Science Fiction

By Smokydog October 14, 2012 in Literature, and Rhetoric and Composition

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Hello! Does anyone know about professors specializing in those genres? I would appreciate any information on the subject. Thanks in advance!

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Look up Rob Latham at UC Riverside. Also, UC Riverside has a huge special collection of science/fiction fantasy. It is a prominent area of study in UC Riverside's program.

• wreckofthehope and lisajay

Thanks for the info! Does anyone else know about other universitities, just in case?

wreckofthehope

Kansas has the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

asleepawake

Florida Atlantic University - There is an MA in Science Fiction & Fantasy and PhD in Comparative Studies.

Well, I don't think her focus is in science fiction & fantasy, but Professor Jenny Mann at Cornell taught a great seminar on Utopian Fiction that included lots of sci-fi/cyberpunk books!

All of these sound really good!

• 2 months later...

chaucerettescs

I know this is late, but for anyone out there interested in these fields for next year's round of apps, the University of Michigan has a lot of really great resources for fantasy/science fiction, first and foremost being Eric Rabkin who teaches fantasy and/or sci-fi just about every semester, runs the fantasy/sci-fi book group on campus, and is doing some all around amazing stuff: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~esrabkin/

Michigan also has a lot of profs who teach courses where you can get good doses of fantasy and sci-fi like Lisa Makman, who teaches children's literature courses, and Gina Brandolino, who teaches a couple classes on fantasy/horror.

I've also had a lot of professors here who were generally very cool about letting me flex my fantasy/sci-fi/horror muscles (as they are some of my sub-specializations). This year I wrote research papers on post-structuralist reader response in the Harry Potter fandom, the influence of Moby-Dick on sci-fi horror film, and the use of fairy tale imagery in Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, all for classes that were distinctly NOT geared towards fantasy or sci-fi.

Genre studies students in general often have pretty slim pickings when it comes to choosing programs/courses, but, if nothing else, Michigan has a really great atmosphere that will grant you some leeway.

gradschoolwannabe

One of my interest areas is 20th c. American sci-fi. There's quite a few schools actually, you can try use google site: search function to look at a program that you're interested in's website. Cyberneticists work with science fiction quite a bit, so there's another option. Bruce Clarke at Texas Tech does interesting work, N. Katherine Hayles at Duke is one of the founding members of cybernetic study in literature. Most of the programs that are in my signature below have a faculty member who works in science fiction at the very least a small amount.

practical cat

Noting though that both of them are lecturers, not professors.

True! I should have noted that.

I just wanted to add that I went to Western Washington for my B.A. there is a great group of professors with interest in Science Fiction in their literature department.

tyler curtain at UNC chapel hill was just elected to the MLA science fiction/utopian & fantastic literature discussion section's executive committee, so maybe look into that?

OctaviaButlerfan

DeWitt Douglas Kilgore at Indiana University is one, and Samuel Delany at Temple University is another. I know of a few more, but they are at universities that only offer an M.A. in English.

enchantedforest

i have a similar question, but for fairy-tales, or victorian reception of fairy-tales? any leads on people in the field?

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