Founding Editor
Elizabeth Parker
Elizabeth is a writer and academic. She is the author of the monograph The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination, published with Palgrave Gothic. She is the founding editor of Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic. She is co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (Rowman and Littlefield) and has published her work in various titles over the years, such as Plant Horror!: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave) and Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment (Lexington). She has co-organised several conferences on space, place, and the relationship between the Gothic and the nonhuman. She has taught English Literature and courses on Popular Culture at a number of universities across the UK and Ireland and is currently working on creative writing projects. Passionate about all things ‘eco’ and ‘Gothic’, she is open to exciting collaborative opportunities.
Co-editor
Harriet Stilley
Dr Harriet Stilley is an early career researcher in modern and contemporary US literature. Since receiving her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2017, she has held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Harriet’s main areas of teaching and research expertise lie in late-20th and 21st-century US fiction, genre theory, horror studies, critical race theory, and masculinity studies. She is the author of From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977 (Routledge 2018) and editor/co-editor of the collections Insurgent Infrastructures (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 2025), American True Crime in the Twenty-First Century Re-Examined: Critical Interventions in a National Obsession (Edinburgh University Press 2022) and Asian American Solidarities in the Age of COVID-19 (U.S. Studies Online 2021). Harriet is the current Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Gothic Nature journal and the European Journal of American Culture.
Email: harrietstilley@btinternet.com
Twitter: @DrHStilley
Book Review Editor
Jimmy Packham
Jimmy Packham is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has research and teaching specialisms in nineteenth-century American literature, the gothic, and maritime writing. He is the author of Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic (UWP 2021) – a study of the importance of spectral, undying, and nonhuman voices to the gothic tradition. He has published articles and chapters on Herman Melville, the oceanic gothic, Britain’s coastal gothic literature, and the life writing of American whalers, and is currently co-writing a book on the human history of the seabed. He is a co-founder of the Haunted Shores research network, and is finding himself increasingly drawn towards the oozy, swampy dimensions of waterscapes – to seaweed and fens.
email: j.packham@bham.ac.uk
twitter: @jfpackham
Blogs Editor
JJ Mokrzewski
JJ Mokrzewski is an MA candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research specializes in ecoGothic media and explores the intersections of environment and digital technologies. Mokrzewski is a recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master’s Scholarship, and a Research Assistant with Connected Minds. Alongside her work with Gothic Nature Journal, she is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Excalibur Publications.
TV, Film and Game Reviews Editor
Emma Davies
Emma is a PhD researcher in English at the University of Bristol. Her project examines the role of wetlands in contemporary British and Irish folk horror across literature and film, exploring how tropes of unstable ground, burial, decay, and unearthing reflect ecological and cultural anxieties. She has published reviews and critical reflections on horror and speculative fiction, and co-runs an eco-horror film club in Bristol. She has served as General Editor of postgraduate journal Question and brings this editorial experience to her role with Gothic Nature.
Her wider research interests include ecogothic and ecohorror, with a particular interest in wetlands and edgelands as gothic spaces that trouble temporal boundaries. She is also an artist and printmaker, and in 2025 exhibited work for the Porthleven Prize exhibition, inspired by folk art and the Cornish landscape. Emma is always happy to chat about scary movies, and you can find her @emma_davies on Letterboxd for silly little reviews.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Stacy Alaimo
Stacy Alaimo is currently Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Formerly she was Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Alaimo’s publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award for Ecocriticism; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). She co-edited Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman, edited the 28-chapter volume Matter (2016) in the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, and edited a special volume of Configurationson Science Studies and the Blue Humanities. Alaimo has more than 45 scholarly articles and chapters published and forthcoming on such topics as gender and climate change, queer animals, anthropocene feminisms, marine science studies, blue humanities, material ecocriticism, and new materialist theory. Her work has been/is being translated into Romanian, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, German, Estonian, and Korean. She is currently writing Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss,a book on ocean acidification and co-editing a new book series, “Elements,” with Nicole Starosielski and Courtney Berger for Duke University Press.
Eric G. Anderson
Eric Gary Anderson is associate professor of English at George Mason University, where he teaches courses in horror/gothic studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and southern studies. His most recent work includes contributions to the Studies in American Fiction special issue on Ecogothic, The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the US South, The Cambridge History of Native American Literature, Queering the South on Film, Small-Screen Souths (in which he holds forth on The X-Files), and Faulkner and the Native South (in which he attempts to place Faulkner’s novel Light In August and Stephen Graham Jones’s werewolf novel Mongrels in conversation). And, along with Taylor Hagood and Daniel Cross Turner, he is co-editor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (LSU, 2015). He is currently working on two new book projects, one on the Indigenous Undead and one on slasher ecologies.
Scott Brewster
Scott Brewster is Reader in Modern English Literature at University of Lincoln. He co-authored of Gothic Travel through Haunted Landscapes: Climates of Fear (Anthem Press, 2022), with Lucie Armitt, and is co-author (with Jeffrey A. Weinstock) of The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story (2023). Previously, he edited (with Luke Thurston) The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2017). Scott has published widely on Gothic and the ghost story, including essays on M. R. James, James Hogg, ghost walking and Gothic theory. Currently, he is in the early stages of a new book project on folk horror.
Kevin Corstorphine
Dr Kevin Corstorphine is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Hull. He has published on Gothic and horror authors including Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. His interests focus on space and place, including haunted houses, gendered and racialised spaces, memory, trauma, and the repressed. He convenes a module on American Gothic at Hull which examines the relationship between American national identity and the Gothic imagination. He has published chapters in several collections on environmental issues in fiction, including Ecogothic (2013) and Haunted Landscapes (2016). Together with Laura Kremmel, he is the editor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018). He is also working on projects in the area of video games and special education needs.
Rachele Dini
Dr Rachele Dini is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Roehampton, where she teaches twentieth-century and contemporary Ango-American literature. Her research interests include literary waste studies, dystopian fiction, feminist science fiction, Marxist theory, eco-criticism, and the history of advertising. Her first monograph, Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. She has also articles (published or forthcoming) in ISLE, Textual Practice, Journal of American Studies, and European Journal of American Studies and The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. She is currently writing a monograph on domestic appliances, electricity, energy sources, and gender in American literature 1910-2010, provisionally entitled “All-Electric Narratives”: Domestic Appliances and Gender in 20th-century American Literature. She has a BA Hons. from the University of Cambridge, an MA from the King’s College, London, and a PhD from UCL.
Simon C. Estok
Dr. Simon C. Estok currently holds the award of Foreign Expert of the Double First Class Discipline Cluster (2018-2021) at Sichuan University and is a full professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea’s first and oldest university). Estok teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and he is co-editor of three books: Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). He has recently contracted two new collections with Routledge, one entitled Anthropocene Ecologies of Food: Implications and Perspectives from the Global South, the other entitled Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia. His much anticipated The Ecophobia Hypothesis was published in 2018 by Routledge. Estok has published extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English Studies in Canada, and others.
Tom J. Hillard
Tom J. Hillard is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University, where he teaches courses on early American literature, environmental literary studies, and Gothic literature. His scholarly research focuses primarily on the literary Gothic in early American literature and culture. Recent publications include work on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Brockden Brown, as well as essays in the volumes Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2018) and EcoGothic (Manchester University Press, 2013). He co-edited (with Amy T. Hamilton) the book Before the West Was West: Critical Essays on Pre-1800 Literature of the American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). From 2011-2018, he served as Book Review Editor for the Oxford University Press journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is currently working on several projects related to early nineteenth-century American Gothic literature.
William Hughes
William Hughes, formerly Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is the author, editor or co-editor of many books and articles in the fields of Gothic literature and medical history, including Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (2000); That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (2015) and The Dome of Thought: Phrenology and the Nineteenth Century Popular Imagination (2022). He has also edited a number of reference works including The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (2013; second edition 2026), Key Concepts in the Gothic (2018) and Key Concepts in Victorian Studies (2023) as well as two student guides to Dracula. He has co-edited a number of essay collections including Empire and the Gothic (2003), Queering the Gothic (2009), The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2012) and Suicide and the Gothic (2019), all of which were co-edited with Andrew Smith, and Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018) with Ruth Heholt. The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion, co-edited with Nick Groom, was published in 2025. Ecogothic (2013), which he co-edited with Andrew Smith, was one of the earliest interventions into the debate which finally brought ecocriticism into dialogue with the Gothic.
Derek Johnston
Derek Johnston is Lecturer in Broadcast at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research focuses on fantastic genres across media, particularly looking at TV and film, and considering the genres and genre texts as historical expressions of culture and identity. In 2015 he published his first monograph, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. Other publications include the article “Landscape, Season and Identity in the Ghost Story for Christmas” in the Journal of Popular Television, “Gothic Television” in The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Vol. III,and the chapter “The Folk of Folk Horror” for the forthcoming Folk Horror: Return of the British Repressed.
Dawn Keetley
Dawn Keetley is Professor of English, teaching horror /gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem PA. She has most recently published in Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, the Journal of Popular Television, the Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014) and co-editor of The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in “The Walking Dead” (McFarland, 2018). She has also co-edited (with Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016) and (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017). Her monograph, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Keetley is working on essays on ecohorror and on the contemporary horror film as well as a monograph on folk horror, under contract with the University of Wales Press, and a collection of essays on Jordan Peele’s Get Out under contract with the Ohio State University Press. She writes regularly for a horror website she co-created, www.HorrorHomeroom.com.
Ian Kinane
Ian Kinane is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Theorising Literary Islands (2016) and Ian Fleming and the Spectre of Decolonisation: Ambivalence and Resistance in James Bond’s Jamaica (forthcoming); editor of Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade (2019); and co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016). Ian is also the editor of the online, open-access International Journal of James Bond Studies, and he is currently preparing a monograph provisionally titled Terror Incognita: Islands in the Gothic Imaginary.
Ashley Kniss
Ashley Kniss is an Associate Professor and Director of Writing at Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland. Her research interests include American Gothic literature, ecohorror, the ethics of waste, American religious history, apocalypse, and the Posthuman. Her chapter, ‘“The hand of deadly decay”: The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in Poe’s ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ can be found in the 2021 publication, Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Her most recent article titled, ‘Gothic Mycology and Posthuman Frameworks in “The Fall of the House of Usher”’, was published in the fall issue of Poe Studies in 2024. Her writing can also be found in Gothic Nature and on ASLE’s series on teaching ecohorror. She formerly served as the Film and TV Review editor for Gothic Nature and is currently working on an edited collection titled Rotting Bodies: Ecocritical Approaches to Death and Decomposition.
John Miller
John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland), Co-Director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre) and series co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. His research focuses on writing about animals and ecology from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the Victorian period. His first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explored the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. His second book was the co-authored Walrus in the Reaktion Animal series. He has also published a number of co-edited collections, including Wolves, Werewolves and the Gothic with Robert McKay (University of Wales Press). Currently, he is near to completing a monograph titled Victorians in Furs: Fiction, Fashion and Activism and has started work on his next project, A Literary History of In Vitro Meat which examines the origins of cultured flesh in the late nineteenth century and traces its development in imaginative literature through to the present. He is also contributing co-editor of The Dictionary of Neoliberal Terms (Spirit Duplicator) and the editor of Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
Jennifer Schell
Jennifer Schell is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her specialties include North American literature, animal studies, Arctic writing, and blue humanities. Her book, ‘A Bold and Hardy Race of Men’: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen, was published in 2013 by the University of Massachusetts Press. She has written numerous articles on ecoGothic themes, many of which involve endangered or extinct species. The list includes, among others, killer whales, polar bears, mammoths, megalodons, and velociraptors. She is working on a book manuscript on these subjects entitled, Ghost Species: North American Extinction Writing and the EcoGothic. She has served as the President of the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the Book Review Editor for Gothic Nature Journal.
Matthew Wynn Sivils
Matthew Wynn Sivils is Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Professor at Iowa State University where he teaches courses on pre-1900 American literature and the environmental humanities. In addition to numerous articles, Sivils is the author or editor of eight books, most recently a critical anthology, Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge, 2017), a scholarly edition of Paul L. Errington’s Of Wilderness and Wolves (University of Iowa Press, 2015), and a monograph, American Environmental Fiction, 1782–1847 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014).
Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs, with Professor Angela Wright, the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of over 20 published books including EcoGothic (2013), edited with William Hughes. He is the author of Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is currently writing a monograph entitled Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One. With Professor Ben Fisher he co-edits the series ‘Gothic Literary Studies’ and ‘Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions’ for the University of Wales Press With Professor William Hughes he co-edits the ‘Gothic Companions’ series for Edinburgh University Press. He is a past president of the International Gothic Association.
Samantha Walton
Dr Samantha Walton is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University and co-editor of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment journal, Green Letters. She works at the intersection of health and environmental humanities, and is currently writing a book about nature, mental health, and the climate crisis. Her other research interests include crime fiction and ecology, histories of women walkers and experimental ecopoetics. Her books are Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (OUP 2015), Self Heal (Boiler House Press 2018), and The Living World: Nan Shepherd’s Environmental Thought (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Talk to Sam about anthropocene lyricism, haunted forests, magic, omens and feminism, and Shirley Jackson’s haunted houses.
Kim D. Hester Williams
Dr. Kim D. Hester Williams (she/her/hers) is a Professor of English and Black/Ethnic Studies. She is co-editor of a collection of interdisciplinary essays on race and environment, Racial Ecologies, published by the University of Washington Press in 2018 as well as various other writings on race and horror, including a chapter on Stephen King’s IT in the book collection, The Many Lives of Scary Clowns: Essays on Pennywise, Twisty, the Joker, Krusty and More, ed. by Ron Riekki. Additionally, Prof. Kim, as her students call her, writes poetry grounded in the Black womanist tradition and eco-feminism. She is currently co-editor of the journal, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and delightedly served as guest editor for the special issue of Gothic Nature V: Decolonising the EcoGothic.
Cover photo credits: Tiffany Hearsey
Tiffany Hearsey is a freelance journalist. She covers death and dying, health, and gender issues, among other topics. She has a background in human rights work that is reflected in her stories spanning across both the United States and Europe. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Salon.com and LA Review of Books. She holds a master’s degree in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict from Trinity College, Dublin.
Website: http://www.tiffanyhearsey.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiffany.hearsey/