Frankenstein and the Feminist Killjoy

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I had a lot of fun keynoting at the Monster Media conference on 18 June, despite doing the talk online and on the road! I had a few technical issues at my end at the very start, but all went smoothly from there.

My talk was called “Making Media Monstrous: Frankenstein and the Feminist Killjoy”. Instead of talking about specific research I am working on, I decided to do something a little more metatextual, just for this conference, and look at some of the many examples of academics and PhD researchers comparing themselves either to Victor Frankenstein, or to his creation. With help from Sarah Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023), and following from her call to ‘be monstrous!’, I used examples from Frankenstein to illustrate how we might make monster studies more monstrous rather than less—i.e. how can we become monsters in a radical way, resisting the exploitative and exclusionary ways academia is often monstrous now.

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Gothic Practice Online Symposium

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Image by Prof. Chera Kee

On 17 June I was part of an online symposium hosted by Professor Chera Kee at Wayne State University (Detroit, USA):

Created for anyone with an interest in the Gothic, practice-based research, and/or how contemporary artists and scholars might engage the critical and the creative simultaneously, the 2026 Gothic Practice Symposium asks attendees to consider how we might conceive of the Gothic, not only as a genre or an aesthetic style but as a way of doing things.

What is a “Gothic Practice”? And how might we enact one in our research and artistic output? What might it look like to act in a Gothic mode?

As we try to imagine what “Gothic Practice” might entail, symposium attendees will engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, creative-critical workshops, and collaborative reflection across literature, culture, site-specific histories, film, and digital media.

This symposium is sponsored by an award from the Wayne State University Arts and Humanities Research Support Program, the WSU Libraries, and the Wayne State Humanities Center.

You can find a recording of our editors’ roundtable on YouTube.

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New year, new zines

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I didn’t make any resolutions for 2026, but one commitment I am trying to make to myself is to be OK with whatever I feel when things go more slowly that they used to, or than I hoped they would. If it’s a happy, lazy kind of slow: great. If it’s something that’s important to me or to the world, it is right to be angry about that, and to take a moment to ask: what then?

I’m also making a tentative attempt to be more consistent in documenting the things I’m doing and working on this year, whether that’s here or on my Instagram or on my work profile, in the acknowledgement that I’ll have ups and downs and that this is OK.

With that in mind, here are two mini-zines I made in January 2026. One uses a poem by Hedgie Choi and is a kind of ‘manifesting’ of the things I want for myself and for those close to me this year (IN THAT LIFE). The other documents some of my academic reading and thinking about zine-making, as I try to decide how to move forward with this work and my university work (AM I A ZINE MAKER?).

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‘Notes on a Research Proposal’

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The A4 page of the text is taped on to a manilla envelope addressed to one of the authors. The postage is marked as ‘underpaid’ and a child has drawn on the envelope in red felt pen. A torn scrap of typed text is stuck diagonally across the envelope, connecting it to the A4 page, a projection from one site of writing to the other. I’ve had a piece published with Amy Brookes that was both a pleasure and a puzzle to produce. The first page is pictured here.

It asks:

How do we sustain creative work in the face of burnout, institutional crisis, the end of funding, the mess of life? Like the workshops that it addresses, this article [this ‘creation’?] is a deliberate attempt to resist closure. It draws on the ongoing work of our “Speculative Space” project, which uses “SF as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM space”—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This project has comprised a series of workshops oriented around site-specific small acts of collective making. Over the last three years we have gathered in the back rooms of the Winchester Gallery, the Women’s Art Library, the Whitechapel Gallery, Science Museum London, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Natural History Museum, and in the digital institutional spaces of Teams meetings. Each workshop was fragile and fleeting, and the record of the work which lingers in photographs, quotes, and ephemera is only an echo of the true outcome which was in the act of gathering, the trust engendered, and the space created for concerns to be voiced. How then to document this work, and to answer the institutional demands to validate its worth using the metrics of academic research and funding frameworks?

Read the article for free in the Open Access journal Imaginations, at the following link: https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29736

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“The Old House’s Bones”: Architectural Salvage and/as Haunting

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This paper was originally presented at the 2024 International Gothic Association conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is republished here in slightly modified form.

This paper is a small part of a larger project on salvage. It is also an attempt at an approach and presentation style that still don’t feel like they are mine. I tried to write a paper about body horror and architectural salvage writing, and failed. This paper is haunted by something, and I don’t know how to exorcise it. As Avery F. Gordon writes in her book on haunting and the sociological imagination, “ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish” (p. 8).

Instead, and in an attempt to stay true to the creative-critical methods I promised in my abstract, I’m going to share a few Gothic meditations on the things this failure to write what I set out to write produced, or what I have learnt about salvage and haunting through this failure. It is an experiment with salvaging that work, or with exorcising it. This paper is about architectural salvage. But it is also about salvage on a more personal level.

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‘Copyrighting trash and trashing copyright’ at TBC 5

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I was invited to speak at this year’s To Be Continued: Defining, Producing, Performing, Consuming, and Theorising Serials and Adaptations online symposium. The symposium consists of a series of short presentations, followed by questions and discussion. In the words of the symposium organisers:

TO BE CONTINUED seeks to bring scholars of adaptation and seriality into an open conversation with one another, not by recommending a single master set of terms or procedures for adaptation and seriality, still less by seeking to absorb either one of them into the other, but rather by raising questions of common concern to both fields and encouraging practitioners in both to share their views and facilitate collaboration.

A recording of the symposium is available through the event website: https://www.monash.edu/arts/media-film-journalism/to-be-continued/panel-2

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Structures of Haunting at transmediale

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This year marked my first collaboration with the transmediale festival in Berlin, as part of an extended collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), where I work.

The annual festival brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.

My contribution to the festival came in the form of the half-day ‘Structures of Haunting’ workshop, in which a group of 25 participants reflected on ways in which the present is haunted by past(s) and futures. What are the structures and infrastructures that scaffold this haunting, and bring it close both temporally and spatially? To explore this question, a group of seven artists and researchers hosted by Winchester School of Art engaged in a series of divination and séance attempts, seeing these as practices of enactment in the present, rather than of predicting ‘the future’ or uncovering ’the past’. Participants joined the workshop both online, and in the basement of a former crematorium in silent green.

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Nosferatu (2024)

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I’ve written a review of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) for The Conversation:

You know the story of Dracula. A Transylvanian count wants to buy land in the west, a young real estate agent visits him to finalise the sale and has a bad time. The count travels to the west to wreak havoc (and to seduce its good women) but is foiled by a band of men (and one woman).

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu, is an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. As such, the names and locations are not those that readers will expect: Count Dracula is Count Orlok, the real estate agent Jonathan Harker is Thomas Hutter and his young wife is not Mina Harker, but Ellen Hutter. The tale is also transposed from London at the turn of the century to the fictional German town of Wisborg in the late 1830s.

The changes were, however, not enough, and Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement. She won, and a court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Thankfully many survived, and now Nosferatu is considered a masterpiece of cinema and a template for horror films.

American director Robert Eggers has taken on the tale, bringing his unique approach to sound and colour to the silent tale. The result is a beautiful film brimming with slow terror and unease.

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