Just a collection of miscellaneous mini-zines that I am uploading so they are all together somewhere. Click the images to download:
Miscellaneous zines (2024)
Remix
FUCK THE UNIVERSITY (zine)
Sometimes it just needs to be said.
Zine made for friends and colleagues at risk of redundancy, October 2025.
New year, new zines
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?).
“The Old House’s Bones”: Architectural Salvage and/as Haunting
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.
‘Copyrighting trash and trashing copyright’ at TBC 5
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
Nosferatu (2024)
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.
Salvaging the Future: Speculative Exercises in World(un)building
Last week I gave a keynote at the fantastic Electricdreams (Sognielecttrici) film festival and conference in Milan. This was the third year the festival was running, with a conference theme of ‘Conflicts and Margins: Imagining Otherness, Ecocatastrophes, Perpetual War, Technological Imbalance, and Systemic Injustice Through Speculative Fiction’.
My talk was called ‘Salvaging the Future: Speculative Exercises in World(un)building’.
Salvaging the Victorians
This week I gave a creative-critical workshop at the Cardiff Hub of the 2024 British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference!
It was lots of fun to be back after having studied and worked at Cardiff University almost a decade ago, and I was blessed with a genuinely warm and lovely group of Victorianists (and neo-Victorianists) for the session. We had a fruitful discussion and they produced some really fun and smart responses to the workshop prompt.
Gothic Practice (CfP)
We are excited to announce a special issue of Gothic Studies, guest edited by the Internet Ghost Collective (Chera Kee, Erika Kvistad, Line Henriksen, and Megen de Bruin-Molé)
“As a habitus, the Gothic describes a way of writing, a way of reading, a way of thinking about stories, a way of imagining,” writes Timothy G. Jones. “Perhaps the Gothic is something that is done rather than something that simply is” (2009, p. 127). In this special issue, we propose to consider the Gothic as not only a subject of research, but as something that we as researchers might do – the Gothic as a research method, a creative practice, a habitus. What might it mean for academics, artists, and other thinkers and makers to work in Gothic ways, or to experience their own work as Gothic, with its associations of unsettling power dynamics, intellectual uncertainty, and the potentially dangerous search for knowledge? Drawing on Jones’s idea of the Gothic as “something between the ceremonial and the ludic” which “ought to be understood, not as a set form, nor as a static accumulation of texts and tropes, but as a historicised practice which is durable yet transposable” (2009, p. 127), we ask contributors to explore the Gothic mode/genre and critical and creative practice. Just as Gothic fictions often explore the dynamics between those with immense power and the most vulnerable, we are interested in work that explores similar power structures in academia and the wider world – how might Gothic practice help us examine, challenge, or even counteract these dynamics?
The Speculative Space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums
Launching later this month, ‘The Speculative Space of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums’ project will comprise a series of creative workshops that explore the critical ground that exists between science fiction (sf) and Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) spaces and collections. It will consider depictions of GLAM spaces in sf media, existing collections and exhibitions which contain sf media, and sf as a creative practice for engagement and critical reflection within GLAM spaces, looking to the imaginative futures and alternate presents of sf to critically reflect on the futures of these spaces and institutions.