eldritchhobbit

Some of the university and conference talks I gave this year are now online.

“Missing Students & Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia" (presented at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture” conference).
View this presentation here.

Why You Should Read The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Watch on YouTube

Why You Should Read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Watch on YouTube

"A Fortnight in the Wilderness" with Alexis de Tocqueville

Watch on YouTube

On November 18, 1897, junior student Bertha Lane Mellish vanished from Mount Holyoke College. Her disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.

I'm currently working on a book project that involves the Mellish case. Today it feels especially important to say her name.

Note: If anyone would like a (very brief!) peek into my current book project, here is a video of my presentation “Missing Students and Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia." I gave this talk earlier this year at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture” conference.

I’ll be presenting a paper (“Missing Students and Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia") at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture” conference on May 2-3 (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). It’s wholly online and free to attend! More information is here.

I am very happy to report that I will be presenting my paper "Missing Students and Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia" at the Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture conference (May 2-3, 2024) sponsored by the Popular Culture Research Network. This talk is related to my current work-in-progress book project. I’m looking forward to it!

I'm delighted to say that my essay "Dark Arts and Secret Histories: Investigating Dark Academia" has just been published in the new academic anthology Potterversity from McFarland.

In the piece I define Dark Academia, distinguish the storytelling genre and its history from the aesthetic, and consider why there is an explosion of new DA storytelling happening now.

(One reason of many, I argue, is that authors such as Sarah Gailey, Naomi Novik, Victoria Lee, and R.F. Kuang, among others, were both inspired by the Harry Potter series and moved to push back against J.K. Rowling's positions through their own works, which offer fresh, diverse perspectives and insightful, timely critiques.)

Dark Academia novel: Don’t Forget the Girl by Rebecca McKanna (2023)

From the cover:
We never remember the dead girls. We never forget the killers. 

Quote:
Sometimes it seems like an answer – any answer – to what happened to Abby that night is what Bree needs to move on.

… for one second, she sees the moment in exact detail: Abby crying under the statue of the Black Angel in her Hermione Halloween costume, snowflakes collecting on her coppery hair. Chelsea and Bree watching her, not putting their arms around her, letting her walk away. Her footprints in the snow leading down that blacktop path. The last trace of her they ever saw.

Dark Academia novel: All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth (2018)

Quote:
There was a story on campus about a student who had died many years ago—so long ago that no one remembered anymore what his name was or how he had died exactly, but there were reports every now and again of a sighting of his ghost. Some said he'd hanged himself in the showers of the senior boys' dormitory over a broken heart; others said he'd overdosed on pills and fallen into an eternal slumber in his dorm bed over a failing exam grade. It was bad luck if you saw him, a harbinger of terrible things to come. Bryce Langston had reported seeing the ghost on his way home from the library one night. The next morning, he got a rejection letter from Harvard. Everyone had thought he would be a shoo-in, and he hadn't even gotten on the waiting list. The next year, Amanda King supposedly saw the ghost right before she got in a fatal car accident. I always thought about the ghost when I was walking around campus at night by myself. I imagined seeing a white smear in the corner of my vision, but every time I turned my head, there was nothing there.

Dark Academia novel: A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid (2023)

Quote:
And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world.... When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.

Dark Academia novel: The Ravens by Kass Morgan and Danielle Paige (2020)

From the cover:
These sorority girls are real witches.

Quote:
That was when she noticed the single tarot card positioned nearly at the head of her bare mattress, as if placed there by a careful hand.

It was the Death card her mother had given her.

The skeleton leered up at her with a gruesome smile, and for a moment, it almost looked like the eyes glowed red. Vivi shivered, despite knowing that it was a trick of the light. I told you. Westerly isn’t a safe place, not for people like you...