Volume 3, Issue 2
(Fall/Winter 2016)
Special Issue: Ghosts and Hauntings
Print run sold out.
Editors' Note and Introduction, by Leah Richards and John R. Ziegler (7-8)
Between Madness, Malice and Marginalization: Reading the Ghost of Jennet Humfrye in Susan Hill's The Woman in Black in the Context of Trauma Theory, by Denise Burkhard (9-20).
How (Not) to Read the American Haunted House, by Dara Downey (21-35)
Re/possessed: the Haunted House, Spectral Debt, and the Hyper-Gothic in Lunar Park (2005), by Amy Bride (36-48)
Ghosts in the Machine: Spectral Technologies, Haunting Affects, and Virtual-Feminine Ghosts, by Raechel Dumas (49-63)
Viral Video, Traumatic Therapy: Hideo Nakata's Ringu and the Attempt to Cure the Future by Inoculating Us with the Past, by Sigmund Shen (64-79)
The Girl with the Gravestone Sidewalk: A Poetics of the Dead, by Joshua Adair (80-96)
Contributors*
Joshua Adair is an associate professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as the director of the Racer Writing Center and coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. His recent work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Notches: Remarks on the History of Sexuality, and Atlas Obscura.
Amy Bride is a second year, AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her project analyzes finance and slavery in American gothic, and particularly how the rise in popularity of specific gothic monsters can be seen as responses to historical financial crises and phenomena across the long American 20th century. She has previously published on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as a late-capitalist commodity vampire and is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on American Studies.
Denise Burkhard studied English Studies, History and Educational Sciences at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, and completed her B.A. thesis on Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 2014. She completed her M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures with a thesis on trauma in neo-Victorian Literature at the University of Bonn in 2016, where she is currently working on a PhD project.
Dara Downey is a Lecturer in the English Department in Maynooth University, Co. Kildare, Ireland. She is the editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, a founding member of the Irish Network for Gothic Studies, and Vice Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies. She is the author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave, 2014) and numerous articles on American gothic texts, from Charles Brockden Brown to Stephen King.
Raechel Dumas received her PhD in Japanese from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Diego State University. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in modern Japanese fiction and film, popular culture, and trauma narratives. She is presently working on her first book, which explores the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japanese popular culture from the vantage of the uneasy cultural politics of Japanese postmodernity.
Sigmund Shen is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. His research interests include horror and monster movies, and the politics of public higher education. He’s currently working on a book about ideology in daikaiju eiga (大怪獣映画, “large mysterious creature cinema.”)
*These notes appear on pages 97-98 of the print version.