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University of glasgow: creative writing.

The Creative Writing programme at Glasgow has gained an excellent reputation amongst writers, agents and publishers. It is perfect for talented and aspiring writers who want to develop their craft, take risks in their work, and gain creative and critical skills; all as part of a supportive community of fellow writers.

Our postgraduate taught and research-led writing courses are among the most challenging and popular in Britain, and have helped launch the career of a number of successful writers including Anne Donovan, Louise Welsh and Rodge Glass, to name but a few.

Our postgraduate taught and research-led writing courses are among the most challenging and popular in Britain, and have helped launch the career of a number of successful writers including Anne Donovan, Louise Welsh and Rodge Glass, to name but a few. * We invite a range of guest speakers who can offer inspiration and advice to you, including authors, poets, journalists, publishers, editors, literary judges and playwrights. You can find information on previous guest speakers by visiting our creative writing subject page. * We have strong links with literary agents and publishers, and an impressive number of our graduates are published and acclaimed authors. * Join our creative community and study at a world-leading university. The University of Glasgow has been named Scottish University of the Year 2022 by the Times and the Sunday Times Good University Guide and rank 33rd in the World for English Language & Literature (QS World Rankings 2022). * Listen to our podcast: Stories from Glasgow - Writing Space with Dr Oliver K. Langmead. * Read From Glasgow to Saturn, our literary journal.

The MLitt in Creative Writing is directed at those who are already engaged in writing. The programme’s clear three-part structure, focused on creative, critical and practical issues, distinguishes it from others offered in the UK.

The programme structure covers:

  • CREATIVE WRITING: CRAFT AND EXPERIMENTATION 1
  • CREATIVE WRITING: EDITING AND PUBLICATION 1
  • CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
  • CREATIVE WRITING PORTFOLIO (PGT)
  • CREATIVE WRITING: EDITING AND PUBLICATION 2

And your choice (subject to availability) of one of the following: * CRIME FICTION * CREATIVE WRITING: OF THE PERSONAL: EMOTIONS AND THE SELF IN CREATIVE NON-FICTION * CREATIVE WRITING: POETRY INTERVENES NOW: DIVERSE QUEER STRATEGIES OF MAKING * THE GENRE-BENDING ART OF ESSAYING * READING & WRITING DEATH & DYING

Creative Conversations and other visiting speakers, which are not courses, also run through both semesters. These courses have been developed to:

  • encourage you to experiment with a range of voices, techniques and genres alongside a consideration of major creative and editorial engagements from the modern through the contemporary period
  • provide a space to undertake extended portfolios of creative and editorial work
  • familiarise you with the writing context (audience, publishing in all its forms, the legal framework, modes of transmission); help you develop a critical understanding of diverse creative, theoretic and critical texts through consideration of major creative and editorial engagements in modern and contemporary writing
  • help you develop the discipline of regular writing by providing a stimulating workshop and tutorial environment in which writing skills can be acquired, discussed and honed

Your portfolio, consisting of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, or script-writing, is at the heart of the summative assessment.

Glasgow is a city known for its culture and our students are involved in festivals, events, radio and literary magazines.

Graduates have gone into journalism, publishing and writing.

You can find a list of alumni on our Creative Writing subject pages. Others have been published in magazines and journals, or have had their work produced and broadcast on radio and television.

A number of our graduates have won or been shortlisted for major prizes for poetry, short fiction and fiction including the Dundee Book Prize, Booker Prize, Bailey’s Women’s Prize, Orange Prize, Fish Short Story Award, Bridport Prize, McCash Scots Poetry Competition, Macallan and Canongate short story awards, Saltire Awards, Scottish Book of the Year Awards.

Full-Time, 12 months started Sep 2023

phd creative writing glasgow university

The  University of Glasgow  is one of the UK’s most prestigious seats of learning, and the fourth oldest university in the English speaking world. Established in 1451 and recognised for its world-changing research and teaching, the University has inspired thinkers from eminent scientist Lord Kelvin and the father of economics Adam Smith, to Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. 

The University:

phd creative writing glasgow university

  • is in the top 100 in the world: Times Higher World University Rankings 2023
  • 95.9% of students in employment or further study 6 months after graduation …

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Scotland's biggest city, Glasgow hosts the largest student population in Scotland and has been named one of the world's top ten cities in travel guides. Combining a compact campus-style environment with the benefits of being in a major city, the University has two main city campuses: Gilmorehill in the cosmopolitan and friendly West End; and Garscube, 6.5 km (4 miles) from the city. A third campus is located in Dumfries some 145 km to the south of Glasgow. Both city campuses have excellent transport into the city centre via frequent buses and subway. Glasgow International Airport, Glasgow Prestwick International Airport and two city centre rail terminals offer easy connections with the rest of the UK and the world.

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Creative Writing

Entry requirements.

This is a popular and selective programme.

All applications must follow the standard entry requirements for the College of Arts:

  • First or Upper Second Class Honours Degree or equivalent qualification (2:1 in the case of UK Research Council supported students)
  • A Masters qualification or equivalent

In addition, for both our MFA and DFA we are looking for writers to have a preparatory one-year, postgraduate masters in Creative Writing with either Merit or Distinction (MA, MLitt or MPhil) or three publications in respected literary journals or magazines, in the intended genre of study. Compelling equivalencies will be considered.

We also require a 20-30 page portfolio of your writing. This portfolio must include a one-page proposal for the project you intend to undertake on our courses and a short sample (5-6 pages) of critical work, if you are applying to the DFA.

As with standard entry requirements we require two letters of reference. Your referees should include an academic and a creative referee where possible. Where this is not possible, you can provide referees from other areas who can vouch that you are who you say you are and that your work and achievements are your own. It is particularly helpful if these referees are familiar with your writing and can provide references on that basis.

Months of entry

Course content.

Our Creative Writing Research degrees are unique and intense programmes for practising writers who wish to complete an ambitious creative project.

Our new research Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and Doctor of Fine Arts (DFA) build on a long history of offering Masters and Doctoral options in the study and practice of Creative Writing.

Our research degrees incorporate hybrid taught elements (literary and practical seminars; workshops; and practical pedagogy) within a supervised research context that best support your creative and critical work.

Both programmes give you dedicated, supported time to complete a substantial creative work, include opportunities to teach writing to undergraduates and apply to be a graduate teaching assistant for other literature courses, and the DFA additionally allows you to undertake an extended academic research, informed by your work and practice, leading to a significant critical essay or output.

Our students enjoy the guidance of writers including Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Colin Herd, Laura Marney, Elizabeth Reeder, Zoë Strachan and Louise Welsh, and critics such as John Coyle, Jane Goldman, Rob Maslen, Alan Riach, and Helen Stoddart.

Across all our postgraduate provision, both taught and by research, students have access to the best of the new and also develop a sense of the origins and histories.

Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow is based in the Edwin Morgan Writing Room with its book, periodical and audio-visual library. There is an ambitious programme of visiting speakers, masterclasses and public events. The University Library with its modern collections and archives is a crucial resource, including the archive for Edwin Morgan’s Papers. We also collaborate with the Mitchell Library, one of the great civic libraries of Europe. And our popular Creative Conversations bring a carefully curated range of visiting speakers to campus every week during the semester.

We have strong links with literary agents and an impressive history of published graduates.

Information for international students

International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic module (not General Training)

  • 7.0 with no sub-test under 7.0.
  • Tests must have been taken within 2 years 5 months of start date. Applicants must meet the overall and subtest requirements using a single test.

Qualification, course duration and attendance options

  • Campus-based learning is available for this qualification

Course contact details

phd creative writing glasgow university

Creative writing

Here in Scotland, storytelling is at the heart of our culture, and in Glasgow particularly, literary culture is varied and rich. Whether you’re interested in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, or screenwriting, we'll guide you towards telling the best story possible, in a city full of opportunity and inspiration.

Creative Writing has had a strong profile at Strathclyde for many years. Some of our students and staff have won, or been listed for, major international prizes and grants from awarding bodies including Creative Scotland, the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC); the Wyndham-Campbell Literature Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, Somerset Maugham Prize, Authors’ Club Novel Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize (for the best first novel in the UK).

Former staff and students include:

  • Zoë Wicomb (South African-Scottish novelist and short story writer, author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, now Emeritus Professor)
  • David Kinloch (long-time Professor of Poetry at Strathclyde, David is the author of five collections of poetry published by Carcanet, including Un Tour d’Ecosse and Finger of a Frenchman)
  • Louise Welsh (author of The Cutting Room and many other successful crime novels)
  • Margaret Elphinstone (historical fiction writer, author of The Sea Road)
  • Andrew O'Hagan (ex-student, nominated three times for the Booker Prize, novelist and nonfiction author, also Editor at large at the London Review of Books)
  • James Kelman (hugely influential winner of the Book Prize for How Late it Was, How Late)
  • Ali Smith (multi-award-winning novelist, short story writer and essayist, author of How to Be Both and The Season Quartet)

Until recently, we had the privilege of working with novelist and dramatist, Beatrice Colin, who was a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing. Sadly, Beatrice passed away in February 2019. She was an inspirational teacher and is much missed by students and staff. An obituary by Gaynor MacFarlane, may be found here . The Beatrice Colin Prize, for the best Creative Writing Dissertation, has been set up in her name.

We combine the best creative instincts with first-hand experience in the creative industries. The world of storytelling is ever-changing, so we make sure to invite only the most relevant industry speakers from the worlds of broadcasting, publishing and digital media. We also regularly work with Glasgow’s Aye Write! Book Festival on events and creative writing workshops, as well as with other partners in the world of publishing, giving students how the real world of publishing works.

In your time with us, you'll be preparing for making a life in writing. Everyone has a story to tell. The challenge lies in learning how to tell it well.

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Work in this area tackles issues relating to sexual orientation and gender. Discover more about our research.

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Drawing from his wide industry experience, Andrew Meehan’s way of looking at screenplay development will inspire any emerging screenwriter and filmmaker.

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Contemporary fiction & non-fiction

At the forefront of our work are the latest developments in fiction and creative non-fiction. Here’s why.

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Course type

Qualification, university name, phd degrees in creative writing.

49 degrees at 42 universities in the UK.

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Related subjects:

  • PhD Creative Writing
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  • PhD Broadcasting Studies
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  • PhD Communication Skills
  • PhD Communication Studies
  • PhD Communications and Media
  • PhD Digital Arts
  • PhD Digital Media
  • PhD Film Special Effects
  • PhD Film Studies
  • PhD Film and Television Production
  • PhD Film and Video Production
  • PhD Media Production
  • PhD Media Studies
  • PhD Multimedia
  • PhD Photography
  • PhD Play Writing
  • PhD Sound Recording
  • PhD Television Programme Production
  • PhD Television Studies
  • PhD Television and Radio Production
  • PhD Visual Communication
  • PhD Writing

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  • Course title (A-Z)
  • Course title (Z-A)
  • Price: high - low
  • Price: low - high

PhD Postgraduate Research in Creative Writing

University of east anglia uea.

  • 3 years Full time degree: £4,712 per year (UK)
  • 6 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

Creative and Critical Writing PhD

Bangor university.

  • 2 years Full time degree: £4,712 per year (UK)
  • 5 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

Aberystwyth University

Phd in creative writing and english literature, manchester metropolitan university.

  • 3 years Full time degree: £4,850 per year (UK)
  • 6 years Part time degree

Creative Writing, PhD

Swansea university, phd english and creative writing, university of roehampton.

  • 4 years Full time degree: £4,711 per year (UK)
  • 7 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

Creative Writing PhD

University of nottingham.

  • 48 months Online/Distance degree: £5,100 per year (UK)
  • 96 months Online/Distance degree

Anglia Ruskin University

  • 2.5 years Full time degree: £4,712 per year (UK)
  • 3 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)
  • 3.5 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

Journalism, Communication & Creative Writing PhDs and Mphils (Distance Learning)

University of portsmouth.

  • 6 years Distance without attendance degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

Creative Writing PhD (On-Campus or by Distance Learning)

University of birmingham.

  • 6 years Distance without attendance degree: £2,389 per year (UK)
  • 3 years Distance without attendance degree: £4,778 per year (UK)
  • 3 years Full time degree: £4,778 per year (UK)
  • 6 years Part time degree: £2,389 per year (UK)

University of Surrey

  • 4 years Full time degree: £4,712 per year (UK)
  • 8 years Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

PhD Film Studies (Creative Practice)

University of essex.

  • 4 years Full time degree: £9,375 per year (UK)
  • Literature - Research- Core
  • Dissertation
  • View all modules

University of Hull

English phd,mphil - life writing, university of leicester.

  • 3 years Full time degree: £4,596 per year (UK)
  • 6 years Part time degree: £2,298 per year (UK)

Creative Writing MPhil, PhD

Newcastle university.

  • 36 months Full time degree: £4,712 per year (UK)
  • 72 months Part time degree: £2,356 per year (UK)

University of Plymouth

  • 3 years Full time degree: £4,500 per year (UK)
  • 4 years Part time degree: £3,030 per year (UK)
  • GSRCWRI1 Research Creative Writing- Core
  • Research Skills in the Arts, Humanities & Business- Core
  • GSRCWRI2 Research Creative Writing- Core
  • GSRCWRI3 Research Creative Writing- Core
  • GSRCWRI4 Research Creative Writing- Core

PhD/ MPhil/ MRes Creative Writing

University of strathclyde, text, practice and research - phd, university of kent, contemporary writing phd, brunel university london.

  • 3 years Full time degree

PhD Creative Practice, History and Theory

University of central lancashire.

  • 3 years Full time degree: £5,000 per year (UK)
  • 6 years Part time degree: £2,500 per year (UK)

1-20 of 49 courses

About PhD Degrees in Creative Writing

Creative writing extends beyond the boundaries of normal professional journalism or academic forms of literature. It is often associated with fiction and poetry, but primarily emphasises narrative craft, character development, and the use of traditional literary forms.

A PhD level exploration of creative writing is a three-year full-time programme, where candidates delve into the complexities of literary expression, developing their own research and create projects with the goal of making an original contribution to the field.

There are more than fifty creative writing PhD programmes in the UK, and these give candidates a platform to fully immerse themselves in their ideas and take their work to the next level.

What to expect

A PhD in creative writing offers the time and space to develop personal creative methods, combined with advanced workshops, critical seminars, and guest lectures from working authors. Under an academic mentor's supervision, candidates typically work towards completing a novel, poetry collection or screenplay.

Postgraduate programmes such as these often foster a supportive community of writers and scholars, and collaboration with peers is encouraged. Graduates can expect to emerge as confident and aspirational authors, with a developed style and professional aspiration, prepared for careers in writing, publishing, academia, or other creative industries. The degree provides a pathway for making significant contributions to the world of literature through original and innovative creative works.

Course type:

  • Distance learning PhD
  • Full time PhD
  • Part time PhD

Qualification:

Universities:.

  • University of West London
  • Cardiff University
  • University of Suffolk
  • University of Buckingham
  • University of Aberdeen
  • The University of Edinburgh
  • King's College London, University of London
  • University of Sussex
  • University of Gloucestershire
  • Bath Spa University
  • University of Lincoln
  • Keele University
  • University of Manchester
  • University of York
  • Lancaster University
  • University of Liverpool
  • University of Hertfordshire
  • University of Bristol
  • Leeds Beckett University
  • Goldsmiths, University of London

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phd creative writing glasgow university

Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic

Realms of imagination launch event.

Thursday December 14 th , 6pm-7:30pm

phd creative writing glasgow university

Join the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic as we celebrate the launch of Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy , recently released by British Library Publishing as a companion volume to the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition.  This highly-illustrated book contains twenty essays providing a wide range of perspectives on Fantasy, its forms and its communities.  Collection editors Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster will be in conversation with essay authors Cristina Bacchilega , Dimitra Fimi , Sofia Samatar and Ann VanderMeer .

Cristina Bacchilega is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa and co-edits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies . Her books include Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997), Legendary Hawai‘i and the Politics of Place (2006), Fairy Tales Transformed?: 21 st -Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder (2013) and several co-edited anthologies. Her current projects are collaborations, one on the fantastic in the Pacific, the other on justice in contemporary fairy tales.

Dimitra Fimi is Professor of Fantasy and Children’s Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. Both her monographs – Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2008) and Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy (2017) – won Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards; in 2021, she received the Outstanding Contribution to Tolkien Studies Award from the Tolkien Society. She co-edits the Perspectives on Fantasy book series (Bloomsbury) with Brian Attebery and Matthew Sangster.

Tanya Kirk is Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at the British Library, and is the lead curator for the major exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (2023-24). She previously co-curated several other literary exhibitions at the Library, including Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (2014) and Out of This World: Science Fiction (2011). She has edited five volumes of classic ghost stories drawn from the British Library’s collections, most recently Haunters at the Hearth: Eerie Tales for Christmas Nights (2022).

Sofia Samatar ’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria (2013), won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her novel The Winged Histories (2016) completed the Olondria duology, and was followed by Tender: Stories (2017), Monster Portraits (with the artist Del Samatar; 2018) and The White Mosque: A Memoir (2022). She lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.

Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History and Co- Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow.  His most recent book, An Introduction to Fantasy , was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.  His essays on Fantasy include work on Mervyn Peake, China Miéville and imaginary cities.  His other books include Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021), Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2022) and Remediating the 1820s (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2023).  He co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) the British Library’s 2011 exhibition The Worlds of Mervyn Peake and is external curator for Fantasy: Realms of Imagination (2023-24).

Ann VanderMeer is the founder of the award-winning Buzzcity Press. She was the editor-in-chief for Weird Tales (the oldest Fantasy magazine in the world) for five years, during which she was nominated three times for the Hugo Award, winning once. She has won the British Fantasy Award, the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. Anthologies she has edited or co-edited include Best American Fantasy (2007 and 2008), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (2011), The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories (2011), The Time Traveller’s Almanac (2013), Sisters of the Revolution (2015), The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), Current Futures: A Sci-fi Ocean Anthology (2019), The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (2019), AVATARS INC. (2020) and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (2020). She currently works as an acquiring editor at Tor.com. Ann lives with her husband Jeff and their cat Neo in Tallahassee, Florida.

You can get your free ticket via this Eventbrite page .

phd creative writing glasgow university

GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds – Call for Papers

phd creative writing glasgow university

Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow  

Deadline for submissions: 5 th January 2024 (11:59pm)

Conference date: 15 th –17 th May 2024 (hosted online)    The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2024, to be held online on 15–17 May, with the theme of ‘Conjuring Creatures and Worlds’. 

Fantasy is inherently an act of conjuration. When we create, dismantle, or engage with fantasy, we are conjuring magic: the impossible, the mysterious, the unknown, and the indefinable. Conjuring fantasy is an act of creation not necessarily defined by our existing modes of being or reality, yet it is always in conversation with our own world. Thus, when we enter fantastika, we necessarily enter a conjured world that invites us to reimagine fundamental aspects of our existence. One way it effects this is by encountering seemingly nonhuman creatures, through which we meet the magical, the uncanny, the monstrous, the Other, and perhaps most uncomfortably, ourselves. Brian Froud writes in Good Fairies Bad Faeries (1998) that “like any supernatural encounter, meeting a fairy—even one who is gentle and benign—is never a comfortable experience”. Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Coody argue in Monstrous Women in Comics that “the monster is difference made flesh”. The same is often true of the worlds these creatures exist in. Conjurations, then, are not wholly foreign; their components are knowable. Through fantasy we can conjure, and therefore communicate, with the necessarily mysterious, the otherwise ineffable. 

The act of conjuration is an ambivalent one, being both beyond and outside our own world yet inherently connected to it and therefore susceptible to the same limitations and preconceptions. In Race and Popular Fantasy Literature , Helen Young argues that “the logics of race and racial difference are so deeply ingrained in Western society that it is extremely difficult, often even for members of marginalised racial groups, to imagine worlds that do not have those structures.” Indeed, Fantastika has often been concerned with narratives where creatures “function as recognizable stand-ins for majorities and minorities and the inevitable conflicts that emerge between identity groups”. We are interested in explorations of marginalised identities, including creatures, systems of magic, and worlds concerned with (but not limited to) race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, class, and (dis)abilities. These conjured creatures and worlds offer an alternative viewpoint into other modes of identity and being. Additionally, the ways in which these fantasies are conjured is important. The medium through which the reader (in the broadest sense of the word) encounters and interacts with the fantasy affects its meaning.  

How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?  

GIFCon 2024 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins. We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5th, 2024 , at midnight GMT.   

We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops, for those interested in exploring the creative processes of conjuring these creatures and worlds into being from a practice-based perspective. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 5 th , 2024 at midnight GMT .  

If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at [email protected] . Please also read through our Code of Conduct . We look forward to your submissions!  

Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: 

  • Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantastic 
  • Creatures as corporeal and/or spiritual beings  
  • Worlds and magic as material or conceptual spaces, realms, or structures 
  • Multi-media representations of creatures, worlds, and creators 
  • Creating and recreating race, class, queerness, (dis)ability and other marginalised identities in fantasy  
  • Explorations and representations of the Other in fantastika 
  • Attraction to, repulsion or rejection of creatures and the nonhuman 
  • Depicting alienation, body dysphoria, body swapping and transformation in fantasy  
  • The anthropomorphising of objects and creatures 
  • Human and nonhuman binaries, hierarchies, and dynamics 
  • Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of creatures e.g., mythic and supernatural traditions, folklore, fantastic tropes and iconic and archetypal characters  
  • Representations of fantastical creatures for example cryptids, fae, magical creatures, supernatural beings, the undead, humanoids, animals, hybrids, AI, extraterrestrials, demons, monsters, horrors, boogeymen 
  • Environments, alternate worlds, ecocriticism, posthumanism, the Anthropocene 
  • Conjuring futures and pasts 
  • Organic vs. artificial worlds, spaces and creatures 
  • Conjuring as a destructive or creative act 
  • Conjuring magic and magic systems 
  • How fandoms and scholars recreate, reinterpret, or conjure creatures, worlds and magic systems 

Framing Fantasy: Brian Attebery and Matthew Sangster discuss the affordances of Fantasy

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To celebrate the publication of Matthew Sangster’s An Introduction to Fantasy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works (Oxford University Press, 2022) receiving the 2023 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies, Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic invites you to an online conversation between the two authors, exploring how we can make compelling cases for Fantasy’s particular qualities and values. The discussion will take place via Zoom webinar on Thursday 5 October 2023 , and will be followed by a Q&A session.

Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. His new book, An Introduction to Fantasy , explores why Fantasy matters in the context of its unique affordances, its disparate pasts and its extraordinary current flourishing. His essays on Fantasy include work on Mervyn Peake, China Miéville and imaginary cities. His previous books include Living as an Author in the Romantic Period (2021), Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2022) and Remediating the 1820s (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2023). He co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) the British Library’s 2011 exhibition The Worlds of Mervyn Peake and is external curator for the upcoming exhibition Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination (2023-4) .

Brian Attebery is Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy at Idaho State University. He won the World Fantasy Award for his editing of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and has been honoured by both the Science Fiction Research Association and the Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for his scholarly work. During his time as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy at the University of Glasgow, he helped launch the Perspectives on Fantasy book series from Bloomsbury Academic Press, which he edits along with Dimitra Fimi and Matthew Sangster. His Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Fantasy: How It Works (2022) is his third, following previous awards for Strategies of Fantasy (1992) and Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2013).

Get your free ticket here !

CFP: Tolkien sessions at ICMS Kalamazoo 2024

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The Call for Papers for the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA (May 9-11, 2024) is now open. Proposals of papers and contributions to roundtables are  due Sept. 15, 2022.  The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic , University of Glasgow, is sponsoring the following session: 

Here Be Dragons: Tolkien at the Medieval Margins

Modality: Virtual

Boundaries, margins and marginality are expanding areas of research in contemporary fantasy studies, in which Tolkien’s work is still central. Tolkien’s medievalist fantasy is particularly ripe for a reconsideration from the perspective of the edges rather than the centre: from negotiating the borders of fantastical geographies, to contested borders of genre within the legendarium, to acknowledging the perspective of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised readers, fans, and scholars. This session will continue the conversation which started at the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic’s 2023 international conference on boundaries and margins in fantasy .

Tolkien’s medievalist fantasy shows a keen interest in boundaries and margins: from negotiating fantastical geographies and their borders, to examining liminal characters in-between political/racial/cultural boundaries, even challenging borders of traditional genres within the legendarium (fairy-tale, romance, epic, science fantasy, etc.). At the same time, contemporary fantasy and Tolkien scholarship is at last opening up towards the experiences and perspectives of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised readers, fans, and scholars.

We invite paper proposals that seek to examine boundaries and margins in Tolkien’s legendarium, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed. 

All proposals must be made through the Congress’s Confex system.  Please carefully follow the instructions on the Congress’s  Call for Papers .

Deadline: Friday 15 September 2023

CFP: Tolkien sessions at IMC Leeds 2024

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CFP: Leeds 2024 IMC Tolkien Sessions 

Paper abstracts are currently being sought for the following Tolkien sessions for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, 1-4 July 2024.  The special thematic strand of this conference will be ‘Crisis’.  See more here .

We are very pleased that the 2024 IMC Tolkien Sessions will again be sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow .

Paper submissions are being sought for the following sessions:  

Tolkien’s Medieval Sub-creation in Crisis 

This session will examine different concepts of crisis in Tolkien studies. Papers may explore the types of crises Tolkien himself created in the body of his legendarium by his revising of several keys stories and legends at different times in his lifelong work.  Papers can address the significance of these narratives and their revisions in Tolkien’s shifting ideas about the world and cultures he was inventing. Papers may also explore adaptations of Tolkien works and how they create crises in our evolving understanding of the canon of Tolkien’s work and its reception.  

Bodily Crises in Tolkien’s Medievalism 

Papers in this session can explore crises/concerns of gender and bodily difference in Tolkien’s works including sexuality and disability.  Indicative areas to be examined include the role of bodies under physical duress, punishment, injury from battle or war, as well as bodies in transformation including prosthetics, spiritual transformation (good or evil) and how bodies and body transformation from Tolkien’s works are depicted in illustrations and in films and other media.  

Racial Medievalism in Tolkien Studies – A Session Celebrating the Works of Professor Dimitra Fimi, founder of Tolkien at Leeds

Papers in this session may respond to, critique and develop key ideas regarding Tolkien’s representations of race that were first explored in  Professor Dimitra Fimi’s ground-breaking 2008 book  Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits , which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2010. Fimi’s evolving body of work has brought to light neglected aspects of Tolkien’s creativity and world-building, including the centrality of the Elves, the role of linguistic invention, and the relationships between race and material culture in Middle-earth This session invites papers that explore Tolkien’s contexts, racial representations and world-building through engaging with and building upon the approaches Professor Fimi has set out in her academic work.

Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches

This continuing Tolkien at Leeds session will accommodate wider topics and new approaches to Tolkien’s medievalism, ranging from source studies and theoretical readings to comparative studies of Tolkien’s works and Middle-earth studies.  

Crises in Researching Tolkien: A Round Table 

The Annual Tolkien at Leeds roundtable will explore the current crises facing Tolkien teachers, academics and researchers in Tolkien and Middle-earth studies.  Topics can include the various adaptions of Tolkien’s works that will continue to grow with new media deals, differing thoughts on treatment of Tolkien’s race, culture and sexuality in his works and the desire of scholars to see, analyse and contextualise more of Tolkien’s remaining unpublished papers.   

  • Please submit a paper contribution title and abstract  by 31 August 2023  to  Dr. Andrew Higgins ( [email protected]
  • Length of abstracts: 150 words (max!)  
  • Papers will be 15-20 minutes long (3 paper sessions will be preferred) 
  • With your abstract, please include name and details of contributor (affiliation, address, and preferred e-mail address)

Restorying Trans Game Studies: Playing with Memory, Fiction, and Magic as Sites for Transformative Identity Work

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Join us on 20 July 2023, at 6pm BST , for an online talk and Q&A with  Dr Theresa Jean Tanenbaum ,  Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. Her talk is entitled:  “Restorying Trans Game Studies: Playing with Memory, Fiction, and Magic as Sites for Transformative Identity Work” . The event will be chaired by Gabriel Elvery.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) is a game designer, artist, activist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine where she is a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. Dr. Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, and research. Her work seeks to create possibilities for social and individual change, using participatory narrative to highlight how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. These experiences of transformative theatrical play create possibility models that are emancipatory, allowing oppressed and marginalized people to inhabit new identities that create possibilities where there were none before and reclaim power and agency denied to them.

An experienced game designer, Tess’s work incorporates physical objects, wearable technology, and interactive tabletops to explore embodied interactions with digital games and stories. She has developed new gaming technologies that push the boundaries of personal fabrication, using 3D printers and laser cutters as platforms for hybrid digital/physical games. Her new book on Playful Wearable Technologies, co-authored with Katherine Isbister, Elena Marquez-Segura, Ella Dagan, and Oguz Burak, will be released by MIT Press in 2023.

Dr. Tanenbaum has been instrumental in helping create new, more inclusive, policies within the academic publishing world that make it possible for people to correct their names on previously published scholarship. In 2020 she co- founded the Name Change Policy Working Group to support other transgender people in advocating for inclusive identity policies within publishing and beyond. During her recent sabbatical she completed the songs for an upcoming autobiographical musical about gender transition during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is currently in the process of leaving academia to pursue a more creative and artistic career.

Talk Description:

In this talk I argue that game design – like magic and activism – is a framework for invoking and materializing seemingly impossible desires for ourselves, and our world. Within the “magic circles” of both play and witchcraft we assert truths about the world that are decoupled from the often-arbitrary rules and power structures that govern daily life. I’ll discuss J Li’s single player pervasive game “Twain”: a game whose central mechanic is to enlist a single player into believing for a moment in a past that is impossible. Twain invites players to briefly rewrite their own memories to include a fiction that can’t possibly be real, but which feels immediate and viscerally true within the experienced reality of the game. I’ll also consider the work of transgender game designer Avery Alder, who talks about this in terms of choosing to believe in the impossibilities. She argues that when the world is arranged to tell a story that robs you of any power, it is up to you to instead choose to tell yourself stories that restore that power. Much like J Li’s “Twain,” Alder’s games invite their players to inhabit alternative selves, as they move through their daily lives. I unpack this idea of play as a site for radical, emancipatory, identity work as a foundation for an emerging transformative game studies practice. I draw a connection between a constellation of allied theories and practices including, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiulo’s work on restorying, Jonaya Kemper’s work on emancipatory bleed, Jerome Bruner’s work on narrative as reality, Bernard Suits’ concept of a “lusory attitude”, Maya Deren’s writings about witchcraft and “successful deviants”, and my own work on design fiction, steampunk, and allohistorical fictional imaginaries. I take an explicitly autobiographical approach to these ideas, as a transgender woman, game designer, and practicing witch. In the spaces where these ideas intersect and overlap I see a seed to grow a trans game studies that doesn’t just “represent” trans people’s experiences, but instead recognizes how games, play, and story are entangled in the ways that we discover ourselves, confront and process our traumas, and defy the impossibilities imposed upon us by the oppressive normative social order.

You can book your free ticket here .

Puck’s Players Presents: Nicholas Stuart Gray’s The Seventh Swan

You never know where magic can be found, even in the lowlands…, july 7 th and 8 th , govanhill parish church.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Amateur theatre company Puck’s Players present a stage production of Nicholas Stuart Gray’s The Seventh Swan . Puck’s Players was originally formed in 2020 by Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic members Marita Arvaniti and Chris Lynch-Becher with the aim to stage and perform fantasy theatre. This is their second production, after a successful staging of Terry Pratchett’s The Truth , adapted by Steven Briggs in the summer of 2022.  

Written by beloved Scottish fantasy novelist and playwright Nicholas Stuart Gray in 1962, The Seventh Swan tells the story of Alasdair, a young man cursed with a swan’s wing for a right arm. This unique sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved fairytale “The Wild Swan” relocates the story to the clan times of 16th Central Scotland. Could Alasdair ever feel human again? Could he forget the freedom of the sky? Mixing witchcraft, family drama, and high adventure, the exploits of Alasdair, Fenella and the mercenary Ewen are a poignant blend of humour, excitement, and tragedy.

Puck’s Players promise audiences a classic family tale filled to the brim with adventure and romance, tragedy and heroism! Get your free ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-seventh-swan-tickets-612262663107

This production is free, or pay what you can . Any proceeds will be used to cover production costs/pay toward future productions. If you are getting a free ticket, and want to support Puck’s Players, please visit our Ko-fi page to donate: https://ko-fi.com/pucksplayers

  • Ewen – Diego Benedetti
  • Alasdair – Meg MacDonald
  • Lady Agnes – Gabi Matic
  • Ranald of Kinrowan – Nathan Protopapas
  • Fenella – Lark McManus
  • Hudart – Chris Lynch-Becherer
  • The Bocan – Anika Klose
  • Black Fergus – Grace Worm
  • The Spaewife – Laura Lynch-Becherer & Amber Pasternack

Directed by Marita Arvaniti 

phd creative writing glasgow university

GIFCon 2023 Workshops and Roundtables

phd creative writing glasgow university

Event registration can be found  here .  The Programme can be found here . Keynotes and Reading Suggestions can be found here . Workshops and Roundtables can be found here .

Workshop registration opens on May 3 at noon BST. 

This document is updated as needed. All times listed are BST, British Summer Time

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“Solo Roleplaying Games: History and How To” with Anna Blackwell

This workshop will introduce participants to the concept of solo roleplaying games, how they differ from traditional roleplaying games, and notable examples from the sub-culture and its evolution over the past few years. It will delve into the process of creating a solo RPG and work with attendees to brainstorm potential game concepts and ideas for further personal development as well as discuss how to self-publish an RPG zine.

Bio: Anna Blackwell is the founder of Blackwell Games, a tabletop games publisher primarily focused on solo roleplaying games with such popular releases as DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game, Apothecaria, it’s spin-off Apawthecaria, and the upcoming For Small Creatures Such As We.

She also writes reviews and articles for Tabletop Gaming Magazine, Wyrd Science Magazine, Senet Magazine, among many others.

Workshop Details: Takes place on Thursday 11 May from 11:15 to 12:30 BST Registration is first come, first served and can be found here .

“Writing Hybrid Genres” with Dr Oliver Langmead 

Join SFF author Oliver Langmead for a creative writing workshop exploring work that crosses genre boundaries. Participants will identify their favourite genre elements in fantasy and beyond, and receive prompts that will help them to combine those elements in their writing, with a view to creating their very own cross-genre fictions. We will discuss some accomplished examples of hybrid genre work, before embarking on a creative exploration ourselves. What are some of your favourite cross-genre works? If you could combine any genre with fantasy to create something new, what would you pick?

Bio: Oliver K. Langmead is a Scottish author and poet. His most recent novels are Glitterati and Birds of Paradise, and his long-form poem, Dark Star, was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2015. He has a Doctorate in Fine Art from the University of Glasgow, and works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. In late 2018 he was the writer in residence at the European Space Agency’s Astronaut Centre in Cologne.

“Boundless Empathy: Exploring Non-Anthropocentric Writing” with Michael Deerwater 

Disrupting the boundaries between character and world, and between subject and object, can help us imagine a life more closely entwined with the more-than-human.

A growing body of work from writers such as N.K. Jemisin, Laura Jean McKay and Jeff Vandermeer is already deconstructing anthropocentric storytelling by challenging the idea of character as an (anthropic) individual acting upon an external environment to generate change. This workshop will explore the work of these authors through writing exercises designed to encourage playful ways to transcend anthropocentric, individualistic writing, and imagine alternative ways of living.

Bio: Michael Deerwater (he/they) is working on a Creative Writing doctorate at the University of Glasgow. His work explores post-anthropocene futures in genres of the fantastic and has been published in Surveillance & Society and presented at the IAFA’s Once and Future Fantasies conference. He is an organiser and chair of the interdisciplinary Bio-Lit Talks and is actively involved in youth work with Volunteer Glasgow and Glasgow City Council. Socials are @MrDeerwater.

“‘The tale is the map that is the territory’: Exploring national identity and the fantastic unknown through the Hunterian Collection” with Siobhan Mulligan and Isabel Ferrari 

In this workshop, participants will explore boundary-making and the fantastic in the construction of national identity. Beginning with a brief discussion of Jorge Luis Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science” as referenced in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, participants will be guided through three writing exercises. Each exercise uses an object from the Hunterian Collection as a prompt: a distance slab from the Antonine wall; Roullet’s 17th century print “Bellerophon Slaying the Chimaera”; and a world map designed for the Qing Emperor Kangxi in 1674. Through these objects, we will investigate the blurry boundaries between myth- and map-making in fantasy worldbuilding.

Bios: Isabel Ferrari (she/her) graduated in 2021 from the University of Glasgow with a Joint Honours Degree in English and Comparative Literature. She completed an MLitt in Fantasy Literature in 2022 at the same institution. Her research interests include modern fantasy literature, transmedia fantasy, and mythology and folklore in fantasy. Her creative writing includes short and long fiction, mostly in the fantasy, romance and sci-fi genres.

Siobhan Mulligan (she/her) is a DFA candidate at the University of Glasgow, researching urban fantasy and representations of the southern U.S. For upcoming workshops, poems, and other publications, get quarterly updates at tinyletter.com/siobhanmull

Workshop Details: Takes place on Friday 12 May from 13:45 to 15:00 BST Registration is first come, first served and can be found here .

“Academic Yassification: From Essay to Article, Navigating Student Publishing” with Gabriel Elvery 

We write essays. They get graded. We pretend to read the feedback… they are never seen again! To save your work from languishing on a hard drive, student journal, Mapping the Impossible has devised a workshop to guide you through the mysterious process of academic publishing. Join us to learn how to give your essay the glow-up it deserves and help find it a forever home in an academic journal (preferably ours 😈).  

This workshop is suitable for students new to academic publishing. Some minimal preparation is required; you will receive an information pack prior to the event. 

Bio: Gabe is a genderfluid, neurodivergent LKAS funded PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. Prior to their PhD, they graduated top for their Fantasy MLitt and PGCE, after obtaining a First Class Degree in English Literature from the University of Warwick. Gabe is an experienced writer and editor: they were co-deputy editor for Press Start , worked for the academic writing department at Glasgow (including their student journal [X]position) and have been published at multiple outlets including The British Fantasy Society Journal, Games and Culture, First Person Scholar and Springer . To see their work, visit their website.   

Roundtable Participants

Researching boundaries and margins  .

Takes place on Wednesday 10 May from 10:00 to 11:00 BST

Chair: Grace A.T. Worm is a 3rd year PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow researching Tamora Pierce and the boundaries of class, gender, adulthood, medievalism, and heroism. She is also Senior Editor for Mapping the Impossible, Headquarters Officer for the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, and the Events Coordinator for GIFCon. Deputy Chair: Alexis Evans

Bettina Juszak is a second-year PhD student in the Humanities department at York University, Toronto. She has degrees in fantasy literature from the University of Glasgow and in linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Her interdisciplinary thesis research concerns the connective and affective dimensions of magical music in contemporary fantasy literature and mythological influences thereon, but she is also interested in translation, intermediality, and fan studies. She is an editor for Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research and is currently in the process of publishing her second speculative fiction short story.

Dion Dobrzynski is a third-year PhD student funded by the Forest Edge Doctoral Scholarship Programme, run by the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) at the University of Birmingham. His project explores forest ecology in the fantasy fiction of William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. Running immersive ‘reading walks’ and interactive workshops in collaboration with Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Dion has been using fantasy forests to stimulate cognitive, affective, and ethical engagements with a real forest environment.

Mariana Rios Maldonado  (she/her) completed her undergraduate degree at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico and her masters at Berlin’s Freie Universität. Her research focuses on the influence of Germanic culture in contemporary literature, Germanophonic fantastic literature, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary production. Mariana is currently a PhD candidate in at the University of Glasgow researching ethics and Otherness in Tolkien’s Middle-earth Narratives, funded by Mexico’s National Council for Science and Technology and its National Foundation for Fine Arts and Literature. She is the Equality and Diversity Officer for the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic.

Parinita Shetty is a part-time public library assistant, part-time postdoctoral researcher and sometimes children’s book writer. She completed her M.Ed in Children’s Literature and Literacies at the University of Glasgow in 2017 and her PhD in Education at the University of Leeds in 2022. She launched a PhD research/fan podcast called Marginally Fannish to explore intersectionality and public pedagogy in SFF fan podcasts. She is passionate about co-creating knowledge, including diverse voices in academic spaces, and finding ways to make academic research accessible to non-academic audiences. 

The roundtable can be watched here .

Tabletop Role Playing Games 

Takes place on Friday 12 May from 13:45 to 15:00 BST

Chair: Emma French is a PhD Student and member of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on how Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) consolidates our notions of fantasy, while enabling players to critically challenge and subvert established genre conventions. She is acting Social Media Officer for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations, and a Senior Editor at Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research.

Dr Andy Tytler has over a decade of writing and editing experience and has facilitated writing workshops around the world. He holds a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Glasgow, and his speculative fiction has appeared in Archive of the Odd, The Colored Lens, Electric Spec, Triangulation: Habitats, and elsewhere. @NotTheAeronaut,  andytytler.com

Misha Grifka Wander is a PhD candidate, writer, and games designer. Their academic work focuses on video game studies, comics studies, and speculative fiction studies, using a ecocritical and queer lens. His creative work focuses on queer experience, speculative futures, and the environment, themes he explores through comics, poetry, and prose. 

Beatrix (Bea) Livesey-Stephens (she/her) is an MPhil student at Abertay University, where she studies the use of safety tools and the performance of romance and sexuality in TTRPGs. She will never shut up about how Caro Asercion’s  I’m Sorry Did You Say Street Magic  revolutionises worldbuilding.  

GIFCon 2023 Boundaries and Margins Speaker Bios and Abstracts

Panelists in alphabetical order (by first name):

Aicha Daoudi

Alvin emmanuel alagao, amber hancock, amy richmond, ane b. ruiz-lejarcegui, anika klose, anushmita mohanty, caighlan smith, cameron bourquein, canchen cao, charlie schroeder and roxanne tuckman, chengcheng you, cristina espejo, declan roberts, despoina tantsiopoulou, dr dimitra nikolaidou, eilidh harrower, esther edelmann, eugenia biavati, fergus attlee and james lowder, francesca bihet, hannah mimiec, isabelle hanshue.

  • James Lowder and Fergus Attlee

Jamie MacGregor

Katarina dulude, louise marchel, luise rössel, m. caroline mccaulay, madalena daleziou, madeleine sinclair, madeline wahl, maggie white, mars nicoli, megan stephens, mercury natis, nathaniel harrington, parvathy r ., rachel milne, rebecca gault.

  • Roxanne Tuckman and Charlie Schroeder

Sababa Monjur

Samantha hammond.

  • Suzanne Black

Timothy Miller

Vaibhav dwivedi, xiuqi huang.

Abstract: Trickster Witches: The Manifestation of the Archaic Trickster Energy in Female Characters of the American Fantasy Genre

The archetype of the trickster has long been linked to boundary crossing and liminality. In recent decades, there have been numerous studies concerning the gender of the figure, and the female trickster rose to the surface. Some of these significant studies include those of Marilyn Jurich, Lori Landay, Maria Tatar, and Ricki Stefanie Tannen. They identify numerous female tricksters such as Scheherazade (One Thousand and One Nights), Cat Woman (Batman), Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games), and Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City). These scholars focused their research on genres like folklore, as well as realistic romance, comedy, dystopia, and thrillers, but they neglected Fantasy. In fact, this neglection could account for two of these scholars’ statements: That supernatural and magical characters, specifically witches, could not be possible tricksters (Jurich 49) and that the archaic feature of the trickster; buffoonery, has disappeared in post-modern times leaving only tricksters as culture heroes (Tannen 133)*. However, what if we inspect Fantasy for supernatural tricksters? This present paper aims to do just that. It examines three American series: Charmed, Supernatural, and Witches of East End demonstrating how trickster energies can manifest in witches like Phoebe Halliwell, Rowena MacLeod, and Wendy Beauchamp. It also demonstrates how fantastical dramas can provide a medium for these characters to exhibit the archaic duality of cultural heroism and buffoonery. It starts by addressing the characters’ liminality in moral behavior. It moves to tackle how they transcend and transgress creative tendencies being verbal and magical, and, finally, it concludes with an examination of the duality and how the three witches demonstrate an archaic image of the archetype.

*The scholar Michael Carroll agrees with Tannen that buffoonery disappears in post-modern tricksters (male or female).

Bio: Aicha Daoudi is a Ph.D. student at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Academically, she focuses her research on genre studies and psychoanalytic criticism. She previously worked on the effects of roleplay in video games, the monomyth, as well as themes of female repression and mental illness. She is currently working on the overlap of the trope of the witch with archaic archetypal energies in American television series of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her research interests include popular culture, American fiction, Fantasy, archetypes, witchcraft, and the supernatural.

Abstract: A Filipino Gamer Gets Lost in the Universe of Saga Frontier in 1998 and 2021: An Autoethnography

SaGa Frontier is a science fantasy Japanese role-playing game developed by Square Enix (then Squaresoft) that was originally released for the PlayStation in 1997. While SaGa Frontier proved popular in Japan and even got a rerelease in the mid-2000s as part of Square’s Ultimate Hits label, it only ended up being a cult classic in North America.

A number of factors could be said to have contributed to the disparity between the popularity of Saga Frontier in North America and the popularity of the game in Japan. The non-linear character of game and its arcane mechanics may have turned off American gamers, for one. Such a difference should not come as a surprise since different groups of people “read” works differently. Indeed, a study by Brückner et. al. (2019) found that there were significant differences in the ways Japanese and German gamers received JRPGs. For one, the study found that in the case of Trails of Cold Steel, German gamers had positive view of its plot while Japanese gamers “frequently criticize the story of ToCS as being repetitive and stereotypical, with characters that lack depth and appear to be unnecessary to the story” (p. 226).

While Square did not intentionally target a Filipino audience for SaGa Frontier, I was able to play its US release in 1998 and its remastered version in 2021. How did I, a Filipino gamer living in the Philippiness—a non-addressee—receive the game? Using an autoethnographic approach, this paper will take a critical look into my own experience of getting lost in the universe of Saga Frontier. By writing this paper, I hope that I can shed more light on how fantasy JRPGs generate different responses as they traverse cultural boundaries.

Bio: Alvin Emmanuel G. Alagao is a graduate of the University of the Philippines Diliman’s MA Art Studies (Art History) program. He currently teaches at the Department of Humanities, University of the Philippines Los Baños. His current research interests include the history of Philippine painting and its aesthetics, art and technology, and reception study/history/theory. He has been playing video games since he was five years old (maybe even younger) and would also like to do more research in game studies. You can reach him at [email protected].

Abstract: Rejected and Searching for Home: An Exploration of Doorways and Queer Representation in Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway

My paper will explore the themes of rejection, home and queerness as represented within Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway through her allegorical use of doors to other worlds. ‘Doors’ and ‘doorways’ is a common trope in both fantasy literature and children’s/young adult literature. From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, these doorways are often associated with identity formation with a focus on that transitional period between adolescence and adulthood. Every Heart a Doorway, however, considers the aftermath of a traditional portal fantasy by emphasizing the tragedy of finding ‘home’ on the other side of a doorway only to lose it again. Indeed, having returned from a different world irrevocably changed, each character at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children embodies the struggle of living an identity when surrounded by misunderstanding and rejection. Through their choices in clothing, food and bedroom, the teenagers of the novel exemplify what Georg Simmel described those who ‘at any moment … separate the connected and connect the separate.’ The poignancy of the author’s approach to questions of doorways and home is further highlighted through the novel’s queer representation; of its five main characters, three are explicitly queer and centers often-underrepresented identities within that spectrum, including asexual and transgendered individuals. Thus, examining this novel through a queer lens, I will discuss the significance of the novel’s connected tropes of doorways and home through an examination of its diverse character representation, how the narrative defines the concept of home and the isolating dangers of being unable to find the way home.

Bio: Amber Hancock is originally from Chino, California, and received her BA and MA in English from California State University Fullerton in 2008 and 2014 respectively. She recently earned her PhD at Bangor University in North Wales, which explored different kinds of border representation across prose genres within Late Modern/Contemporary Welsh and Scottish-based, English-language literature. Twitter: Dr Amber Hancock@amadaun777

Abstract: The Living (and Loving) Dead: The Erotic Rejection of Death in Critical Role: Campaign 3

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is no stranger to transgressing death. From death mechanics and saving throws, revivification spells, undead creatures, and more, the fascination with defying or reversing death is central to many players enjoyment of the game. Never is this more obvious than in the live-play D&D stream Critical Role (2015-Present) where character entanglements with death form recurring plot arcs throughout the three campaigns streamed on Twitch.com. The current campaign, Critical Role: Campaign Three, follows the adventuring party The Bell’s Hells as they grapple with political troubles and corruptions. In this group, actress Marisha Ray plays the character of Laudna, a dead woman brought back to life by the – also dead – necromancer who killed her, Delilah Briarwood. Both characters are defined by their conscious/unconscious rejections of the final bodily boundary – death. This paper aims to perform an autopsy on the dead women and the fan reactions to them, exploring the eroticism of the relationship between them and the fan eroticisation of Laudna in particular. The relationship between Laudna and Imogen Temult, played by actress Laura Bailey, has been a fan favourite, with the pairing amassing 800+ hits on fanfiction site Archive Of Our Own. This paper will use a combination of critical engagement with the live-stream and improvisation by Ray, Bailey, and Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer and fanart and engagement on social media, supplemented with gender and queer body politics theory. It will argue that the fan engagement aids in the transgression of death, placing the dead female body as an object of queer erotic potential, not sexualizing it under the male gaze, but rather under a queer female gaze.

Bio: Amy Richmond (she/they) is an early-career academic who holds an MA(hons) in English from the University of Aberdeen and an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. Specialising in contemporary fantastic fiction, their research interests include spatial theory, queer theory, Young Adult fiction, and body politics. She has presented at Exclamat!on Conference and is on the journal board as Social Media Officer and Copyeditor for Mapping the Impossible.

Abstract: Embracing Hybrid Identities in Silvia Moreno-García’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Silvia Moreno-García’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022) offers a feminist re-imagining of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), focusing on the antagonist’s daughter, Carlota Moreau. Although both novels involve a ruthless Doctor who has managed to manufacture half-human, half-animal creatures, Wells’ takes place in a remote island, away from repercussions, while Moreno-García’s is set against the backdrop of the Caste War of Yucatán, in late nineteenth century Mexico. This paper aims to show that Moreno-García’s use of real Mexican history and elements of its cultural identity, far from serving as mere background against which to tell Wells’ story, becomes an opportunity to approach alterity and transgression from an intersectional perspective. The hybrid identity—highly mediated in the original novel by its white, male, bourgeois focaliser—is offered its own voice in the 2022 re-imagining by having the titular daughter be a hybrid herself. Thus, I argue that hybridity becomes a metaphor for all forms of exploitation endured by marginalised communities: that of women under men, slaves under owners, people of colour under white people, and an overarching capitalism that makes commodities out of them all. In order to illustrate this, I will first look at the importance of naming as a process to establish the hybrids’ identity and its interrelatedness with the Maya language and culture, through a comparison of each novel’s depiction and mediation of alterity. Secondly, I will examine Carlota’s journey of self-discovery through the lens of what Latina feminist author Mariana Ortega has designated as the ‘multiplicitous selfhood’. Lastly, I will ponder on how The Daughter of Doctor Moreau converges Wells’ original dissolution of binary oppositions with an optimistic approach towards marginalised identities that not only breaks such hierarchies but also embraces—cultural, linguistic, racial—hybridity.

Bio: Ane Belen Ruiz Lejarcegui is a PhD student from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, where she has been granted a scholarship by the Basque Government to carry out her thesis on hybrid identities, power asymmetries and othering in science fictional narrative discourse. She has done extensive research on H.G. Wells’ early works for her BA and MA dissertations, and her interests include Gothic fiction, Monster Studies, Critical Posthumanism and Cultural Studies.

Abstract: “My Colours Are Mine” – New Shades of Detective Fiction in Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina’s Catching Teller Crow

The traditional detective story follows a well-established pattern: a crime, an investigation, and the restoration of order. Genre rules regarding plot and solution first laid out by Van Dine establish a Great Detective who uses scientific methods and rationality to end a previous abnormal state while also restoring a sense of justice. Taking the colonial origins of the detective story into account, the reinstated order is largely influenced by a Eurocentric viewpoint. The alleged superiority of European values leads to the othering non-European characters, who are in turn presented as suspects or culprits.

Instead of perpetuating European methods and empiricism in the detective story, Catching Teller Crow by Aboriginal Australian authors Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina defy the genre tradition. With three Aboriginal dead girls at the centre of the investigation, the speculative YA novel challenges the traditional depiction of the Great Detective by foregrounding “intra- and intergenerational relationships between women rooted in indigenous epistemologies” (Mattila and Burger 20). In this paper, I will explore how the narrative’s combination of prose and poetry as well as the non-Western approaches to closure and reconciliation offer powerful resistance to the social order fostered by the traditional detective story. Addressing Australia’s history of colonisation and the Stolen Generations through a magical realist lens subverts and dismantles the established colonial order, consequently turning Catching Teller Crow into a feminist postcolonial rewriting (20, 26). Contesting Van Dine’s rules for detective fiction, the novel’s supernatural detective, witness, and murderer defy the boundaries of not only detective fiction but also the borders between life and death as the natural order is not restored but re-established.

Bio: Anika Klose is a German postgraduate student of Fantasy MLitt at the University of Glasgow. She completed her BA in Media and Culture Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Dusseldorf. As an illustrator and student assistant, she was part of the project “Charting the Australian Fantastic”. Moreover, she published blog posts and lectured on Australian Speculative Fiction. In 2022, she has spoken at GiFCon and the Once and Future Fantasies Conference. Her research interests include fantasy costumes, queer monsters, and bodily disassociation.

Abstract: On Why We Read Fantasy: Affective Responses as Generic Boundaries

Fantasy, like most genres, is difficult to define or delineate, as the varieties of texts that employ the fantastic across time and space often have little in common. BBC’s Merlin, Syed Haider Bakhsh’s Qissa-e Hatim Tai, Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West all share elements of the fantastic. As a more disparate set of texts could barely exist, in what ways can the generic boundaries of fantasy be defined? In this paper, I will explore how the affective responses of the audience can be used to understand the unifying features of the fantasy genre. What emotional needs, I ask, does fantasy fulfill, why have readers turned to fantasy for these emotional experiences, and how do these emotions diverge and converge across contexts? If genre can be viewed as a pact between the reader and the audience, this pact that can help understand the boundaries of fantasy. My methodology aligns with Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, which uses reader responses to analyse the romance genre. In this paper, I shall examine the strategies, tropes, and rhetoric used by writers of the fantasy texts mentioned above, as well as elements of marketing and presentation that fulfill specific audience expectations. I shall also draw upon audience responses through book review and online discussion posts in conjunction with affect theories to answer the question of what audiences look for in fantasy. Both audience disappointment and satisfaction, I shall argue, have influenced the evolution of fantasy. Finally, drawing on Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic, I shall also analyse the implications of marginalization in fantasy to ask how underrepresented or problematically depicted audiences negotiate affective responses to fantasy fiction, and the ways in which are they excluded from the generic pact between audience and writers of fantasy.

Bio: Anushmita Mohanty is from Ahmedabad, India, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She previously graduated with a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford, and has a BA in English from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. Her research has been published in the Oxford Research in English Journal, and the Contemporary Literature Review of India. She previously worked as an Assistant Editor for Studies in History, SAGE. Her research interests include education and literature, fantasy fiction, children’s literature, and book history.

Abstract: A Hero’s Morality Play: Epic Fantasy Heroes and Morality Mechanics in Video Games

In considering Epic Fantasy, Tolkien inevitably comes to mind, alongside other more modern popular works such as Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. But what happens when the narrative tropes represented by such Epic Fantasy stories are channeled through the medium of video games? How does the story and the consumer’s reaction to the story change when the consumer is required to step into the shoes – or take up the sword – of the Epic hero themselves? In this presentation, I seek to analyze the ludonarrative operations (how gameplay and narrative work together to create the gaming experience) of several Epic Fantasy games which employ either explicitly or by implication morality mechanics through player in-game choice, such as the Fable series (2004-2010), the Dragon Age series (2009-2004), and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). I expose how allowing the player moral choice within such narratives might enhance player engagement to the narrative they are personalizing, but at the risk of disengaging players from the ethical implications of the choices they have made. To engage in morality mechanics through Epic Fantasy video games complicates player ethical involvement as (1) the fantastical setting places moral scenarios a step away from “reality” and (2) the player’s assumption of the hero role in these games often goes unchanged despite player actions; a player can lie, cheat, steal, murder, and still narratively retain the role of heroic savior in the main plot. This paper therefore seeks to investigate how the video game consumer’s moral playing of the hero – as opposed to the literature or film-consumer’s moral judgement of the hero – can change perhaps not the overarching glory of the Epic Fantasy hero plot but, and perhaps more insidiously, the day-to-day living as a hero in a virtual fantasy world.

Bio: Caighlan Smith is a PhD student with the English Department of Memorial University of Newfoundland, holding a B.A. (Hons.) in English from Memorial University and an MLitt (with Distinction) in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. Her current research interests include power dynamics, gender, monstrosity, fantasy, and hero narratives in video games.

Abstract: How Do You Solve a Problem Like “Mairon”?: Exploring How Sauron’s Most Marginal Name Recasts the Lord of the Rings

“[N]othing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron was not so.” These words from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings express a theological axiom and hint at a character arc for its hidden and eponymous villain—an arc we are never shown, even in the wider corpus of Tolkien’s Legendarium. Unlike Morgoth (the Luciferian “beginner of discord”) who appeared within the opening chapter of The Silmarillion as the unfallen “Melkor,” the unfallen pre-Sauron remained hidden and nameless—until 2007. With the publication of the 17th volume of the Tolkien linguistic journal Parma Eldalamberon, we learned that Sauron had once been “Mairon” (The Admirable).

This name exists only in one place, a figurative and literal margin: a single footnote to a metatextual project inside a niche linguistic journal which had, until very recently, remained out of print. Yet within fandom this marginal note has generated a metaphorical “Great Wave” of transformative works and renewed interest in Sauron as a character. What gives this bit of marginalia such potency in fandom? What can be gleaned from this name amid the dozens of other names and epithets applied to Sauron both in The Lord of the Rings and across the Legendarium? How does “Mairon” compare to the names of Sauron’s maia foils Melyanna, Curumo, and Olórin? What might “Mairon” suggest about the telos of its owner? And what can we make of Tolkien’s statement that Sauron “continued to call himself “Mairon” […] until after the fall of Numenor?”

In the spirit of Croft’s and Broadwell’s work on onomastics in Tolkien as well as the Tolkien fandom history work of Dawn Walls-Thumma, I will explore these questions with regard to how they help shape a potential “capsule story” for the Lord of the Rings, himself.

Bio: Cameron Bourquein (she/her) is an independent scholar who received her BA from Anderson University in 2006 (Theatre Studies, Graphic Design, Information Systems). Her undergraduate thesis integrated her love of sculpture, set design, acting, and the photography of Josef Sudek into a one-woman show examining the intersection of external space and internal narrative. A lover of Tolkien since the mid 90s, Cameron is currently focused on researching Sauron and his intersections with the metaphysics of Middle-earth. She will be presenting this April at the Popular Culture Association’s 2023 National Conference and this August at The Mythopoeic Society’s Midsummer Seminar.

Abstract: What the “Other” Uncovers: The Periphery of the Medieval Fantasy World and Universe

When contemplating the wonders of the universe, human beings tend to respond imaginatively to phenomena that seem to be poised between fantasy and reality. Monsters have been considered as creatures characterised by “otherness” in various cultures across the fantastic world, as can be observed in medieval writings on distant races and marvellous lands. Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to monsters and the ideology of monstrosity in the Middle Ages; however, relatively little effort has been made to perform cross-cultural examination of monstrous races in the global context of medieval fantasy. This paper will explore how people in the global Middle Ages represented their wonderment at “monstrous races” from the 11th century to the early modern period.

In conversation with scholarship on religious conflict and cultural dissemination in the Middle Ages, the paper will investigate the narratives of monstrous figures in a range of sources, from medieval Christian world maps, mappae mundi, to Arabic and Chinese manuscripts on geography. It will offer insights into how medieval people interconnectedly expressed contemporary social, theological and ideological concerns about “the Other”, both “real” monsters and people who were perceived as monstrous beings. A historical analysis of religious conflict in the Middle Ages will be provided to explain why medieval Christians perceived the Monsters, the Muslims and the Orientals as “the Other”, and how they transformed this conception of otherness into a cartographical form. Meanwhile, this paper will examine how non-European cultures shaped fantastic depictions of the “the Other” to discover compelling interconnections between historical records of monstrous races in liminal spaces and margins.

Bio: Canchen Cao is a postgraduate student in Medieval History, who holds a first-class honours degree in English Literature and History of Art from University of Glasgow. Her academic interest mainly focuses on exploring the interconnection between medieval geography and monstrous creatures from a global interdisciplinary perspective, seeking to uncover how medieval historical records formulated people’s understanding of the human body and monstrous races. She has already presented her research at several international academic conferences, extensively on monster study, medical science and cross-cultural investigation of cartography in the Middle Ages.

Abstract: Grotesque Bodies and Surreal Planes: Transgressing the Boundaries of the Weird through Video Game Glitches

Video games are unique in their propensity to break–no matter how streamlined a virtual world is, the intended experience engineered by a developer will, inevitably, shatter. A player might find themselves glitching out of the intended boundaries of their virtual world and into a place unknown even to developers, filled with half-rendered horrors and surreal images. Or, they might find that objects and characters begin to behave and move in ways that defy the laws of physics. This paper will explore how these unintended effects invoke the Weird, as defined by Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie: “that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition, and experience” (2017). Though this paper will argue that all glitches are inherently Weird, player response to these unexpected events can vary greatly; a glitch in a video game may be grotesque, warping the human form beyond recognition. It may be sublime as imagined by Immanuel Kant, unveiling a surreal plane of overwhelming power and beauty. It may even be absurd, attested to by the various humorous videos on YouTube devoted to video game glitches. This paper will use examples of such glitches from well-known titles like Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series, Behavior Interactive’s Dead by Daylight, and various realistic military shooters.

Bio: Charlie Schroeder (he/they) received their Master of Letter’s in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. Their research interests include video games, Tolkien studies, queer & transgender theory, and postcolonial theory.

Roxanne Tuckman (she/her) is a graduate student in the English MA program at California State University Northridge. Her research interests include Gender & Women studies, Queer theory, and the Horror genre.

Abstract: Outlandish Representations: Crossing Boundaries of Species and Genres in Young Adult Liminal Fantasy

If the Anthropocene “resists literary fiction”, as Amitav Ghosh claims, due to the unrepresentability of the increasing uncanniness of quotidian experience, young adult liminal fantasy may emerge as an alternative mode of fiction formally suited to this task. The genre is often characterized by carefully nuanced sensibilities at the subtle borderline between adolescence and adulthood, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the natural and the unnatural to conjure up the banality of the impossible encounter. Representative of such liminality, fantastic creatures are byproducts of complex interactions and literary mediations of the adult authors drawing close to ever-new aesthetic and ethical norms for young adult readers. Within the Anthropocene context, new creatural beings come one after another along with a trend of genre blending on the literary scene. Drawn on the Deleuzian conceptual resources, this study hypothesises a typology of “outlandish creatures” and investigates how the representation of these creatures is canvassed for a capacity to hybridise genre expectations and draw out post-anthropocentric implications that appease current concerns for environmental ethics. The selected narratives, Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo (2011), Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (2011) and Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City (2018), are closely read with a focus on the affect of child-animal encounter, the mixture of magic realism and ecoGothic, and the zoomorphic imagination each evokes. The study concludes with the ethical-aesthetic complexity of YA liminal fantasy in crossing boundaries between species and genres in the Anthropocene.

Bio: YOU Chengcheng is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau. Her work has been published in, among others, Children’s Literature in Education, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, The Lion and the Unicorn, International Research in Children’s Literature and English Studies. Her latest book is Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry, coauthored with Christopher Kelen (Routledge, 2021). Her publications also include book chapters in the anthologies: Debatable Lands: New Directions in Children’s Gothic (2017), and Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction (2018) and Representing Childhood and Atrocity (2022).

Abstract: Fairy tales and Fantasy: Expanding Boundaries and Subverting Expectations

Despite the well-known escapist qualities of fantasy literature and fairy tales, the societies and worlds they depict are often based on the real societies and societal norms under which they were written. This means that beyond the dragons, unicorns and wizards, the patriarchal structures that have dominated the social discourses for centuries are often a very prevalent issue in the genre, even in our current time. In this paper, I aim to examine and discuss the boundaries of the fantastic and fairy-tale genres through two different novels, Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), by Diana Wynne Jones, and Stardust (1999), by Neil Gaiman. I will analyze whether these works break apart from conventions usually present in these genres and whether they can be used as examples of subversive narratives. In specific, I will focus on gender roles and the representation of patriarchal structures, two topics that continue to be a point of contention for works in these genres. Are recent fantastical works really breaking the boundaries of female agency and representation and these traditional, patriarchal structures, or does the basic structure continue to be the same with only the added awareness and recognition of the problem? I argue that by including fairy-tale elements and tropes it later subverts, Howl’s Moving Castle stands perfectly between the fairy-tale and fantasy genres, creating a unique story that breaks with the traditional moulds of both; whereas Stardust, despite being a more recent work, offers a more traditional and conservative view of the same story. With this, I hope to prove that the fairy tale is a genre that can keep pushing the boundaries of fantasy, but that it is important to differentiate between the content that truly upends the genre’s roots and the more performative ways of raising awareness of current issues.

Bio: Cristina Espejo is a first-year PhD student at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has a keen interest in fantasy literature, specifically fairy-tale narratives and how they influence fantastic works. She has been working on this topic ever since she finished her English Studies degree, continuing to develop it through her master’s thesis “The New Fairy Tale: Subverting Genre and Characterization in Diana Wynne-Jones Howl’s Moving Castle and its Film Adaptation”. She is currently working on the subversive tendencies of the fairy tale in fantasy novels of the last half of the 20th century.

Abstract: Blurred Battle Lines: Analyzing Energy Analogues in Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn

This paper is a case study for a larger argument I have been making throughout my academic career by blurring the lines between popular and academic theoretical discourse. Therefore, this paper uses a popular fantasy narrative, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, to explain the concept of a hyperobject and how hyperobjects can help us understand the looming environmental catastrophes of the twenty-first century. To accomplish these goals this paper begins with a brief overview of Legendborn’s plot, followed by a similarly brief summary of the theoretics of hyperobjects. The summary of hyperobjects is followed by examining the similarities between the contemporary world’s energy systems and the magical energy systems utilized in Legendborn. Specifically, this section focuses on how the different uses of that energy system between the Root practitioners and the Legendborn highlight the varying energy systems within contemporary western society. Progressing onwards, the paper then examines the blurred boundary between the individualistic magic of the Legendborn and the communal magic of the Root practitioners as analogous to the current alternative energy debates in western society. Lastly, this paper concludes with an explanation of the other fantasy narratives which could ameliorate understandings of energy humanities concepts. By blurring the boundaries between fantasy and other scholarly genres, as well as the boundary between academic and popular scholarship, this paper showcases the arbitrary nature of the placement of the boundaries.

Bio: Hello, my name is Declan Roberts, and I am a Ph.D. student at Memorial University. I am focused on finding ways to relate ecocritical and energy humanities concepts through popular YA fantasy narratives. Furthermore, I aim to highlight how popular narratives can contribute to a societal understanding of various energy and environmental concepts contributing to our current climate crisis. My other scholarly interests are examining the concept of work and labour and the changes to these concepts throughout literary epochs.

Abstract: Opposing School of Thought: Marginalization and the Campus in R.F. Kuang’s “Babel”

In Rebecca F. Kuang’s 2022 novel “Babel,” boundaries are almost tactile. The Royal Institute for Translation sits in the heart of Oxford, which is the heart of England, which is, finally, the centre of the entire world. Set in the early 19th century, it recounts the story of a young Cantonese boy named Robin, brutally severed from his family and brought to the centre of centres to aid the colonisers through the act of translation. He and his friends, the rest of the “Babblers” who also come from the periphery into the centre, are denied assimilation or even acknowledgement of anything but their necessity. The school, the place where they were supposed to finally find their equals and the subject of their childhood hopes for a sense of belonging shall never truly accept them as anything more than means to an end. I will try to show that “Babel” is a contemplation about the role of education in the continuation of building walls instead of bridges among peoples and institutions. The protagonists’ subalternity, the term used by Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” has been inserted into the centre through cultural interpretation, but it has yet to be completely rid of, which is ultimately the goal according to the theorist. Despite their translation-focused education, their existence goes untranslatable, their bodies become their “texts” through which they attempt speech. The transformative power of the campus is not only seen in the way silver bars produced in and by it bend reality, but also in how it makes centres out of peripheries, provided they remain within its premises. The moment of their exit, though, they reassume their otherness, and when they come back boundaries, proven precarious, are bound to be destroyed.

Bio: I have a BA from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens on English Language and Literature with a specialization on Literature and Culture. I hold an MA from the same department, titled “The Greek Element in Anglophone Literature,” with a dissertation on modern rewritings of Euripides’s “Bacchae.” This year I started my PhD in the English Language and Literature department of the University of Athens, where I research the role of the university and boarding school campus in fantasy fiction. I live in Athens and I am a volunteer teacher at the Open School for Migrants in Piraeus.

Abstract: Centering on the Margins: The Evolution of Fantasy Tabletop Roe-Playing Games

Since their inception, fantasy Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPGs) had to contest with accusations of deliberate marginalization of women, minorities and indigenous populations. Initially a niche hobby addressed at a narrow demographic, TRPGS evaded criticism up to a point as their origins in pulp fantasy literature rendered them beneath the notice of critics; however, shifts in the perception of fantasy facilitated by online discourse as well as the increased popularity of gaming among adults recently brought these issues to the forefront. Established game designers responded to criticism in different ways; some made incremental changes, others upended established narratives while new designers revitalized the genre by adopting entirely different approaches in accordance to new mores. Given the well-established and reciprocative relationship between fantasy literature and fantasy TRPGs, and the increased impact of gaming in Western culture, this evolution is of importance far beyond the gaming community.

The proposed paper aims to a) examine the ways in which women, minorities, subaltern cultures and LGBTQ+ people have been either marginalized or symbolically annihilated in TRPGs and b) chart the evolution away from marginalization and into inclusion through a decades-long process of conflict and negotiation. To achieve these aims, the paper utilizes a combined framework of narrative and cultural studies, mainly focusing on the Dungeons and Dragons and World of Darkness as case studies but also including illustrative examples from Legend of the Five Rings, Vaesen and Call of Cthulhu. The conclusions suggest that, due to their unique format, fantasy TRPGs are quick to respond to shifting sociocultural mores and evolve accordingly though not without encountering resistance; the process is also bound to influence not only fantasy literature but also Western culture in general.

Keywords: TRPGs, Fantasy Literature, Intersectionality, Narrative, Culture

Bio: Dimitra Nikolaidou holds a PhD from the University of Aristotle, Thessaloniki. Her work has been presented in numerous conferences and workshops. Her papers have been published by Bloomsbury and are scheduled to be published by Palgrave Macmillan and MIT Press, among others. She’s the co-founder of the Tales of the Wyrd Speculative Fiction Workshop. She is additionally a published author of speculative fiction.

Abstract: “You kids have fun” – ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ and ‘Scream’ as Reflections of Changing Generational Fears

This paper will compare Scream (1996) and Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) as reflections of the Millennial generation and Generation Z, discussing how their differences show the changing fears of the two generations, and how audience reactions to Bodies Bodies Bodies reflects the societal view of Generation Z as a whole.

Scream (1996) is a defining horror film for the Millennial generation, as it rejuvenated the horror genre, bringing back the slasher film and thrilling audiences. Across the Millennial generation, there has been various waves of horror, ranging from extreme gore to psychological thriller. However, it is theorised that a new wave of generational horror is beginning to appear. The arrival of ‘Gen-Z’ horror creates an interesting comparison of two generations, showing the boundaries between them and how different their fears are.

Alice Bucknell, in her article ‘How modern horror cinema is galvanising Generation Z’, explains “Gen Z horror is not so much concerned with terror, violence and trauma point blank as it is with the forces of consumption culture that surround it.” (2017) In many ways, Bodies Bodies Bodies follows very similar tropes to that of classic horror films of Millennial audiences, but places them in a new context with influence from Generation Z culture, often with a comedic undertone. With references to TikTok, astrology, and in-depth discussions of mental health and trauma, the movie is reflection of how Millennials view the younger generation.

By comparing Scream and Bodies Bodies Bodies, this paper moves to show how the horror genre is shifting focus, and beginning to depict fears and worries of the new generation of viewers, with polarising reactions from audience members either enjoying the new wave of horror, or believing it to be just as superficial as Gen-Z is seen to be.

Bio: Eilidh Harrower graduated from the University of Glasgow, achieving Distinction in her MLitt English Literature degree. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, theatre and literature, transmedial studies, horror, witchcraft and paganism, creative writing and experimental forms of literature. She hopes to examine some of these interests even further as a PhD candidate in the future. Eilidh had the honour of presenting at the Dissenting Beliefs conference in December 2021, and Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) in April 2022, and Once and Future Fantasies in July 2022, all held and organised by the University of Glasgow.

Abstract: Fantastic Underdevelopment in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs and Reinaldo Arenas’ Hallucinations

The literary fantastic has often been analysed as a symptomatic expression of the return of the repressed (Jackson 1981) or reduced to a structural reader function (Todorov 1973). More recently, it has also been read as the superstructural expression of the fluctuations and tensions of capital (McNally, 2011). What said psychoanalytical, structuralist, and Marxist approaches have in common is that they describe the fantastic as an “unconscious,” or “passive” function of an underlying structure, be it a psychic, semiotic, or basal economic one.

This paper, in contrast, recasts the literary fantastic as a deliberate, that is, conscious response to modernity. Postulating that the genre seeks to make palpable the “phantom-like objectivity” of bourgeois society, I argue, more concretely, that the fantastic emerges as a form of “critical anti-realism” in response to regional discourses about political and economic under/development. As Andre Gunder Frank (1979) and Samir Amin (2011) contend, “marginal” world regions only begin to underdevelop as a result of their integration into a single world market. As such, underdevelopment is literally the creation of modernity, and, hence, the product of capital’s spatial hierarchization into core and peripheral economies. The fantastic, as I will contend, emerges as the aesthetic expression of the coincidence of residual marginal and dominant emergent elements, and, in so doing, actively comments on the dialectics of under/development. My paper sets out to describe this correlation between the fantastic and the notion of dependent accumulation by producing a comparison between E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs and Reinaldo Arenas’ Hallucinations. Both novels emerge in the context of arising nation-states (Germany and Cuba) and depict the social transitions from (colonial) feudalism to bourgeois society. As such, they directly address the question of politico-economic integration and development.

Bio: Esther Edelmann is an early-career scholar, who successfully defended her dissertation Inverted Worlds and Belated Baroques, last year at Leiden University. Her dissertation focuses on neo-baroque and fantastic elements in Latin American and German literature and philosophy. She teaches at the Departments for “International Studies” and “Literature, Film, and Media Studies” at Leiden University. Before graduating from Leiden, she spent a few years as visiting Graduate Student in the Department for German and Romance and Literatures at The Johns Hopkins University. Currently, she is preparing her dissertation manuscript for publication in Brill’s “Literary Modernism Book Series.”

Abstract: Resisting narrative patterns: the transgressive power of Terry Pratchett’s parody

Parody only works if the audience knows what is being parodied in the first place. In other words, parody can only work if there are already expectations of how the narrative will go. So, when a dragon attacks the city of Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Guards! Guards!’ both the readers and characters await the hero who will come forth to save the day, recognisable as such by a crown-shaped birthmark and the heroic sword he is carrying. Pratchett introduces such a hero, and then has the dragon incinerate him on the spot and proclaim itself king instead.

Pratchett sets up the scene according to conventional standardised narrative patterns, before disrupting them through parody. He draws attention to our expectations, challenges our assumptions, and questions the boundaries that regulate the centre of the genre and gatekeep its margins. He first uses the transgressive power of parody to highlight and subvert, then he offers an alternative, turning the attention of the readers towards other narratives, other heroes.

Using both Attebery’s ‘fuzzy sets’ and Prototype Theory I argue that parody is essential to the fantasy genre. It can help it flourish by turning away from the centre and looking at marginal narratives instead. It tackles issues of story-making as well as representation and diversity, challenging what is too-often perceived as the standard and therefore the true and only form fantasy can take.

Parody is a liminal force, it depends on the centre of the genre in order to work but takes the narrative spotlight away from it. Terry Pratchett’s parody operates on that ‘consensus fantasy universe’ and its transgressive force sweeps the entire genre by showing, questioning, and ultimately breaking its boundaries and expanding its margins.

Bio: I am doing my PhD at King’s College London with a project on Parody in Medievalist Fantasy. Before this I had just as much fun doing an MA in Medieval Studies, with a dissertation on the medieval in the Marvel Universe, and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literature, which in turn ended with a dissertation on why fantasy dragons started talking. I was asked once why we should read fantasy and decided to make a career out of explaining why. In my spare time I can be found talking about Lancelot to any unsuspecting passerby.

Abstract: Fantastic Interdisciplinarity: Two Human Geographers on Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star and Your Name.

The last several decades has seen the field of Human geography develop a notable interest in both film (Cresswell and Dixon, 2002) and, to a lesser extent, speculative fiction (Kitchen and Kneale, 2001). Despite this, engagements with fantasy remain on the periphery of the discipline and work on fantasy film is especially rare. By foregrounding work at the margins of Human geography, this paper draws attention to the specific ways that the fantastic can be utilised across disciplines to provide valuable interdisciplinary insights. This is done through two case studies concerning the animated films of Japanese director Makoto Shinkai. The first engagement examines Voices of a Distant Star (2002), a short film about two teenage friends, a boy and a girl, who are separated after one of them is sent into space to fight an alien threat. By examining the figure of the mobile phone, used by the characters to communicate across distance, this analysis unpacks the place of technology in the film, highlighting its emotional resonances and transcendental capabilities. The second engagement relates to Your Name (2016), a romantic fantasy film featuring two high school students, a girl from the countryside and a boy from Tokyo, who mysteriously start to swap bodies and must eventually undo the catastrophic impact of a comet. By foregrounding the film’s portrayal of the comet, this analysis examines how Your Name entangles human life with the inhuman rhythms of the Earth and broader cosmos. Alongside their own arguments, both engagements also emphasise shared themes, including the important role of love and connection in Shinkai’s work. Overall, through the work of two Human geographers, this paper highlights the value of fantasy across disciplines, articulating arguments around the place of technology and the inhuman in the films of Makoto Shinkai.

Bio: James is an interdisciplinary PhD student at the University of Glasgow in the department of Geography and Earth Science. His current work considers the textual analysis of film, the embodied experiences of stargazing and the tracing of falling meteorites.

Fergus is an interdisciplinary PhD student in Geographical and Earth Science at the University of Glasgow. His current research is investigating issues of privacy and consent in relation to geolocational technologies, which are increasingly prevalent across all aspects of life.

Abstract: Beyond the Table and Into the Dungeon: How Neurodivergent and Queer People Explore Identity Through TTRPGs

For most of history, media in all forms has often taken a very heteronormative and neurotypical viewpoint, and in many instances, this is still the case today. Due to this, people who are queer and/or neurodivergent, may struggle to find representation within forms of media such as video games, television, and cinema. Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs) provide players with an immersive experience unlike one that more traditional media could provide. Players can control characters’ choices, narratives, and storylines and have influence on themes being touched upon. How do queer and neurodivergent people operate, when they are provided with a fantasy setting in which they themselves set the boundaries and limits they explore?

Many individuals that are part of these marginalised groups find themselves excluded from society for how they act or identify. When given a safe setting in which they can explore this freely, I hypothesise that new opportunities for exploring their identities will arise. It may be that this is through character creation, in-game role play, or through navigating the game more generally. For example, this could mean a queer person exploring their identity by creating a queer character, or an autistic person finding comfort in having the guidelines of TTRPG core rulebooks to help explore who they are through roleplay. All throughout, they are navigating the boundaries that the game sets for them, as well as those they set for themselves.

This paper will discuss the ways in which queer and neurodivergent people develop and explore their own identities through engagement with TTRPGs, with a specific focus on Dungeons and Dragons. Through engagement with methods such as gameplay analysis and group interviews, it explores questions about the relationship between gameplay and identity, particularly in relation to marginalised communities.

Bio: Fiona Reid is a postgraduate student, currently undertaking a Master by Research in Psychology at Abertay University. Her main research interests explore neurodiversity, sexuality, and gender, often through the lens of nerd culture and with a passion for creative research methods. Her research is often interdisciplinary, engaging with disability studies, queer studies, ludology, and social studies. Having completed an undergraduate degree in Public Sociology studying women with ADHD through photovoice, she is now expanding her research to reflect her interest in games, fantasy, and roleplay.

Abstract: On the Borders of Fairyland: Science and the Supernatural in Andrew Lang’s That Very Mab and The Chronicles of Pantouflia

Scottish anthropologist and journalist Andrew Lang is best known as editor of the popular Coloured Fairy Book series (1889-1913). However, his fictional works have received less attention, even though they reflect his sometimes contentious opinions regarding the study of magic and folklore. The satire That Very Mab (1885), published with the poet May Kendall, follows exiled fairy queen Mab’s tour of nineteenth-century English society, which is now hostile to the fairy folk’s old ways. The volume explores the boundaries between science and supernatural. In one incident, Mab is captured by a scientist, treated like a butterfly specimen, and categorised. When his son starts worshiping the fairy, the scientist proclaims to have discovered the origin of religion. This is a moment of self-satire for anthropologist Lang, who previously published Custom and Myth (1884). Reflecting the common folkloric theme of fairies forever retreating, Mab flees to safety in the Admiralty Islands, just outside the realms of the British Empire.

Similarly, Lang’s Pantouflia stories address issues traversing the borders of fairy tales and rational enlightenment thinking. Prince Prigio (1889), Prince Ricardo (1893), and the Tales of a Fairy Court (1907) burlesque the courtly fairy tale. Prigio begins with the traditional theme of fairies presiding over a royal Christening, with one fairy cursing Prigio to be too clever. Prigio grows up too rational to believe in fairy magic, even though it surrounds him. However, eventually converted to fairy belief, Prigio raises his son Ricardo on an excess of fairy magic. Conversely, Ricardo merely uses fairy gifts like machines to complete his quests, losing all gallantry in the process. Like Victorian consumerist devices, magic fairy gifts are rendered as tools to complete tasks. In these texts Lang reflects on the fairies’ cultural position and demotion to the nursery in the face of nineteenth-century modernity.

Bio: Francesca Bihet is an independent scholar who completed her PhD at the University of Chichester in 2020. Her thesis Folklore and Fairies: the History of Fairies in the Folklore Society from 1878 to 1945 explored the changes in the academic treatment of fairies by Folklore Society members over this period and how far these reflect wider folkloric and cultural trends. Among other articles, she has published the chapters ‘Pouques and the Faiteaux: The Channel Islands’, in Magical Folk (2018), and ‘Death and the Fairy: Hidden Gardens and the Haunting of Childhood’, in EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).

Abstract: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children! Liminal Fantasy and Biopower in Hope Mirrlees’s ‘Lud-In-The-Mist’

As a liminal fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist plays with the boundary between text and reader. The reader is required to take an active role in constructing and interpreting the fantastic elements of the text. This happens when they are able to recognise the existence of Fairyland and its fruit, while the characters refuse to acknowledge it.

This paper explores the ways in which concepts of liminal fantasy and biopower can be used in concert, through textual analysis of Lud-in-the-Mist. Biopower is concerned with human beings existing as a species that can be made the ‘object of a political strategy’(1). In this system human beings are viewed as something closer to machines that can be acted upon to produce desired outputs. The society of Dorimare is deeply concerned with the bodies of its citizens. The main conflict of the novel arises from the proliferation of ‘fairy fruit’ and its invasion into the children of Lud. The consumption of fairy fruit and disappearance into fairyland represents a transgression of the political strategy of Lud when it takes the children away from their schools. This threat to society is not rectified through the senators and law men of Lud, who serve as a source of humour. Peace is only restored when the disciplinary institutions of the schools, senate, and language of Lud are transgressed and the population is reconciled with their fairy heritage.

Reading Lud-In-The-Mist, and other liminal fantasies, through the lens of biopower opens up potentially new readings of the ways in which state infrastructure and disciplinary institutions can control the boundaries between domination and freedom within fantasy works. As well as the possibilities for their transgression.

(1)Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977-78 ed. by Michel Senellart trans. by Graham Burchell (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillian 2007 [1977-78]) p. 1

Bio: Hannah Mimiec is a Masters student on the University of Glasgow’s Fantasy MLitt program. They previously completed a degree in Scots Law and English Literature at Glasgow. Their research interests lie within the interaction between fantasy and economics, specifically political economy and feminist theories of work, as well as with the mechanics of tabletop roleplaying games. Hannah is the MLitt liaison on this year’s GIFCon committee and is currently playing far too much D&D and Cyberpunk Red in their spare time.

Abstract: From Prisoner to King: Entrapment and Escape Through the Fantastic in Susanna Clarke’s Novels

Susanna Clarke’s novels, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Piranesi, depict the exploitation of marginalized people through magical systems and imprisoned in a fantastical ‘Other World.’ This paper explores the ways in which Clarke’s marginalized characters, specifically Stephen Black and Piranesi, in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Piranesi subvert power structures and free themselves from their captors as expressed in the liminal fantasy realms in which they reside. Both characters experience an involuntary thresh-hold crossing into another world and are exploited by captors learned in magic for the sake of power or knowledge. However, both Stephen and Piranesi are able to free themselves and transgress the systems they were marginalized by through the knowledge and/or power they gain from the fantasy worlds they have been imprisoned in. This paper will draw upon Farah Mendelsohn’s definitions of portal and liminal fantasies to explore how the fantasy worlds in these two novels are used by characters to both support exploitative systems and to transgress against them.

Bio: Isabelle Hanshue (she/her) is an Mlitt student studying Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include Gothic Literature, Romantic Literature, media studies, and Medievalism. She is currently planning a research project focusing upon marginalized identities and the history of vampires in media. In her free time, she enjoys reading Neil Gaiman and Mary Shelley novels and watching horror films. She also enjoys learning languages and is currently learning Romanian.

Abstract: Now with more blood, guts, and gore!: Horror Cinema in the Wake of Covid-19

Horror is a genre that has always been in conversation with the society that it is created in, and is often directly influenced by it. With this in mind, I would like to question how the global Covid-19 pandemic has impacted horror already, and what changes we may see going forward.

Since its inception, the horror genre has been questioning and transgressing boundaries in order to provoke a reaction from the audience. It is this breaking of boundaries, along with the often taboo subject matter that the horror genre deals with, that has resulted in the genre being subject to moral panic and censorship. Horror gives audiences a controlled environment in which to experience fear and other extreme emotions without any real life consequences.

In an article for Fangoria, Zoe Rose Smith notes that 2022 saw a considerable rise in the popularity of movies labelled ‘extreme horror’ — a sub-genre of horror that refers to movies that include an excessive use of violence and sexual content. These types of movies are generally considered too ‘extreme’ for mainstream audiences, often resulting in them having a small release and being harder to locate. Aaron Michael Kerner (2016) identifies a similar demand for extreme horror that emerged in the wake of 9/11 with the rise of the ‘torture-porn’ sub-genre. He argues that the war on terror and collective trauma experienced by Americans was instrumental in the development of the genre. As reality itself becomes more horrific, horror films are forced to become more extreme and push more boundaries to provoke their audience. By comparing Terrifier (2016) to Terrifier 2 (2022), and Hellraiser (1987) to the 2022 remake, I will argue that we are already seeing mainstream horror movies become more extreme as a result of the global trauma of Covid-19.

Bio: Jamie MacGregor (they/them) completed their MLitt in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Their Masters dissertation was about Creative Destruction and Transness in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013-2015), and they hope to continue this research in a PhD focusing on transness and the horror genre. Jamie has varied research interests depending on when you ask them, but they are primarily interested in the horror genre across media, queer and trans theory, fan studies, gothic studies, the uncanny, medical humanities, and the overlap of philosophy and media. They can currently be found stressing about PhD applications and cuddling their dog.

Abstract: To Refuse What Has Been Refused to You: Depictions of the Undercommons in the Future Imaginaries of Arcane and Babel

Both released within the past year, the novel Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang and the television series Arcane share many commonalities despite possessing very different premises. Namely, they depict societies that are revolutionized by fantastical energy advancements through forms of magic. These technologies benefit the very wealthy but are created at the expense of those on the margins of society. While the boundaries in these texts are largely social, in the case of Arcane, there is visual depiction through the wealthy of Piltover living on the ‘topside’ of the bridge, while the city’s poor inhabitants live in the polluted ‘Undercity.’

The texts feature themes of the undercommons as described by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Hermes Society of Babel and the Firelights of Arcane function as secret groups that choose intentionally to live on the margins, outside of the boundaries drawn by the ruling elite, the British Empire and Piltover respectively. In doing so, they are able to enact social change and transgress upon society’s boundaries by rejecting being a part of them at all.

Through comparative analysis, this paper explores the similarities and differences between these two fictional depictions of the undercommons and how they demonstrate a need for social change based in our present, existing as much as future imaginaries as they do fantastical tales. Though The Undercommons was published nearly a decade ago, its relevance persists; Timothy Lyle, for example, noted the urgency to join the undercommons in a CLA Journal article in 2021. This renewed urgency and along with the surging popularity of texts like Babel and Arcane demonstrate the ways in which fantasy reflects our current sociopolitical state and demonstrates the need for change.

Bio: Katarina Dulude is a current Fantasy MLitt student at the University of Glasgow. She is interested in modern fantasy and animation, eco-criticism and queer ecologies, feminist studies, Marxism, and popular culture. She has three previous publications including her undergraduate thesis “Mad Men, Troubled Mothers, and Scarred Children: Representations of Parent-Child Trauma in Mad Men” and two other articles both published by Johns Hopkins University. She also enjoys acting and photography, adores cats, speaks three languages, and has an undying obsession with She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

Abstract: Fantasy as crossover carnival: Transgressing boundaries in Aaron Becker’s wordless picturebook trilogy

Putting child characters at the centre, fantasy for children in various forms allows experimentation with children’s position in the world and navigation of space between childhood and adulthood. Situating adult characters in child-initiated adventures, fantasy for dual readership extends the intergenerational interactions and offers possibilities of reconstructing adult-child relations. Drawn from Nikolajeva’s (2010) application of carnival theory to children’s literature and Beckett’s (2017) conceptualization of crossover picturebooks, this article takes fantasy as crossover carnival and investigates how fantasy may empower ordinary children or/and adults in Aaron Becker’s trilogy, enclosing wordless picturebooks “Journey” (2013), “Quest” (2014), and “Return” (2016). With reference to Painter et al.’s (2012) strategies of reading visuals, it incorporates the analysis of compositional meanings of fantasy worldbuilding, ideational meanings of character representations, and particularly interpersonal meanings of power realisation. The selected wordless narratives demonstrate fantasy’s empowerment of marginalised children and fantasy’s liberation of the adult who is fully occupied by work through threshold-crossing to a magical realm, obtaining heroic traits, and possessing magical agency. Such empowerment and liberation could only be achieved under certain conditions and for a limited time, as fantasy worldbuilding retains the real order of the world, and characters’ physical dislocation to the real world is temporary. This study further illustrates the perception that fantasy is not as opposed to realism. The healing power of crossover fantasy to cross-generational relations is inherently permanent and can transgress the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

Bio: Lizao Hu holds an MEd in Children’s Literature and Literacies offered by the University of Glasgow. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Literary Studies (English) at the University of Macau. She is interested in inquiring about ecological, multicultural, and power issues in children’s literature as well as multimodality in children’s picturebooks.

Abstract: Revolution or Fantastic Dream? The Importance of William Morris’ ‘News from Nowhere’ in the Psychedelic Creative Landscape of 1960s London.

‘News From Nowhere’ is William Morris’ utopian vision of a future which expounds the social, political, creative, and aesthetic ideals of the nineteenth-century visionary. The tale tells of the time travel of William Guest with whom the reader journeys from 1890s Britain to a future approximation of London and a journey up the Thames. Guest witnesses a society revolutionised in the 1960s where a characteristic retrieval of a medieval aesthetic is enjoyed in a reforested landscape with relaxed social rules and the absence of any monetary currency.

Utilising visual and textual material from my recent PhD research (The Transcendental Aesthetic – Nineteenth Century Revivals in the 1960s) this paper will explore the distinct resonances between Morris’ text and events in the 1960s and the potential role of the novel as a catalyst in social and creative change. In reaction to the streamlined designs and consumerism of the early 1960s, key counter-cultural movements later in the decade simultaneously pushed new boundaries in social freedoms and behaviours whilst adopting older forms of representation and a sense of self-definition much akin to Morris’ vision. While designers such as Mary Quant and John Pearse adopted the designs of Morris for their clothing, creative collectives such as ‘Hapshash and the Coloured Coat’ and ‘The Fool’ (cf medieval designs for The Beatles’ Apple Boutique where payment was elective) adopted interdisciplinary creative practices where visual and lyrical imageries merged. As boundaries of fantasy and reality blurred in the wake of new psychedelic drugs, so too did many social / creative norms and the paper will explore the role of Morris and his c20th readers in creating a liminal space for transcendence and/or revolution, firstly in the imagined world of the text and secondly in inspiring influential artists, writers, and designers to attempt to realise something of Morris’ ideal.

Bio: Louise Marchal is a visual artist and writer and is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Research for her biography of the sculptor Frances Darlington led her to re-evaluate the perception of romantic nineteenth-century imagery as received through its revivals in the late 1960s, and this informed her PhD topic which queries the articulation of psychedelic or meditative transcendence through such imageries. Louise graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1995 with an Honours degree in English Literature.

Abstract: Crossing the lake – The land of the dead, resurrection, and Jesus in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) examines boundaries and margins in numerous ways. For example, protagonists Lyra and Will both move in the margins of their societies, while being confronted with the physical and mental boundaries between childhood and adulthood and the liminal space in-between, adolescence. Furthermore, the whole trilogy revolves around the crossings between countless parallel worlds, including a knife cutting through reality/dimensions.

One of the most unique and fascinating border-crossings in the trilogy, however, is Lyra and Will’s journey to the world of the dead. This late episode is rich with liminal and marginal spaces, as well as metaphorical and literal breaches of boundaries and borders: e.g. the suburbs of the dead, port of transit, and holding areas; personal Deaths hiding in the margins of vision; existential questions about “truth/reality” vs. “lies/fantasy” raised by the Harpies; the crossing of a lake to the land of the dead, including the painful disjunction of the bond between soul/dæmon and body/human.

It has been acknowledged that Lyra and Will function as Eve and Adam figures, through whom Pullman attempts to re-tell (and redeem) the Christian Fall myth (e.g. Tóth; Dickerson and O’Hara). The literature on the trilogy, however, stays remarkably silent on another biblical figure: Jesus Christ. Occasionally, his absence from the trilogy is proclaimed and Pat Pinsent even goes as far as attesting it “a Christ-shaped hole” (30). However, acknowledging the presence of a Jesus figure in the trilogy would give the story a whole new religious dimension.

Thus, this paper will examine Lyra and Will’s ultimate border-crossing to the land of the dead (and the following resurrection/s) in more detail and will argue that Lyra and Will together are Jesus-figure/s who die and walk between the worlds in order to redeem the dead and liberate their souls.

Bio: Luise Rössel is a current PhD student in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is writing about fantasy literature from around the millennial change with religious elements, mostly from Revelation and Genesis. She obtained an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow (2019) and an MPhil in Children’s Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (2018). She did her BA degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, as well as Philosophy, at the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität, Munich.

Abstract: “The Childbed is Our Battlefield”: Examining Depictions of Childbirth in Contemporary Fantasy

Pregnancy has often casually been called a “magical time” in women’s lives. However, fantasy media has frequently portrayed pregnancy and childbirth as a traumatic, and often deadly, experience for women. This vision of childbirth recently resurged in the public’s attention with the 2022 premiere episode of HBO’s House of Dragons, in which a highly reported upon scene involving a forced caesarean delivery ends in the death of the mother. As she tells her daughter, “The childbed is our battlefield.”

This paper takes a critical eye to birth scenes in fantasy media, specifically examining texts which are also regarded as empowering to its female identifying characters. The central question of the paper asks how fantasy’s often impossible depictions of birth might affect reader’s perceptions of the reality of childbirth. Are these scenes empowering or frightening? Can there be a definitive line between fantasy and reality in depictions of childbirth? When is a border between realism and fantasy crossed? Is the brutality of some fantastic birth scenes warranted, given the maternal mortality rate of women worldwide?

The texts examined include a fairy-led, magical birth scene in Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End, the horrifying birth of the Minotaur in Madeline Miller’s Circe, and the multiple depictions of traumatic births in the HBO series House of the Dragon.

Bio: M. Caroline McCaulay is a writer and scholar from Carmel, Indiana, USA. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Indiana University and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. She frequently writes fiction about sisterhood, Hollywood, and mental health – but also about sorority girl werewolves and pregnant cows. Her creative work can be found in Boudin, the online home of The McNeese Review. Her scholarship focuses on depictions of motherhood and female empowerment in literature. Her scholarship has most recently been presented at the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.

Abstract: Threshold Crossing and Deconstructed Portals in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn defines portal fantasy as ‘a fantastic world entered through a portal’ and argues that in this type ‘the fantastic […] does not “leak.” Although individuals may cross both ways, the magic does not’ (xix). Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is an exception that blurs the boundaries between reality and the fantastic and features an intrusion in the form of the consciousness-consuming Spectres. A similar motif is present in Laini Taylor’s YA trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, whereby Karou, a human living in Prague, is raised by human-monster hybrids whose house is a portal between the human world and the fantastic Eretz. DoSaB displays portal-quest elements, with a relatively clueless Karou entering Eretz through a magical threshold. Yet, this trilogy is not a clear-cut example of portal fantasy either, as intrusions also feature prominently. While portals are integral plot points in both trilogies, their use requires sacrifices to save the universes connected by them.

This paper studies portals as thresholds in HDM and DoSaB to examine attitudes regarding maturity and personal responsibility in YA fantasy. The trilogies’ starting points both involve threshold-crossing yet move away from earlier children’s and YA fantasy traditions, with their clear entrance of an innocent main character into the fantastic and equally clear return to ‘nonfantastic normality’ as analysed by Catherine Butler. Instead, the main characters enter the portals later, after painful experiences, and the fantastic remains in their lives after forgoing portals, moving away from boundaries often encountered in earlier works. Moreover, the featured intrusions emphasize the cost of portals in both trilogies, revealing shifting attitudes permeating contemporary YA fantasy, with both trilogies granting their young main characters agency, recognising their ability to destroy, but also to mend their worlds.

Bio: Madalena Daleziou obtained her undergraduate degree in English Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She then studied the Fantasy MLitt at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include Children’s and YA fantasy, anime and manga, animals studies in fantasy, and dystopian literature. Madalena is a speculative fiction author whose short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Deadlands, and other venues. She is the Social Media Officer of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic.

Abstract: Fantastical Subjectivity in Rana Dasgupta’s Twenty-First Century Folktales

This paper examines the politics of fantastic irrealism in selected short stories from Rana Dasgupta’s twenty-first century collection Tokyo Cancelled (2005), an “experiment in storytelling”, which revitalises the “old wisdom” of folktales in order to register both the “giant forces of modernity” and the “exquisite minutia of personal experience” in a hyperconnected world (Dasgupta 2006, 13-15). For Dasgupta, folkloric forms mediate in fantastical terms a world of irreal “transformations” linked directly to “global forces” (Dasgupta and Elborough 2006, 6). This paper focuses specifically on Dasgupta’s portrayal of fantastical subjectivities, showing how the contemporary folktales collected in Tokyo Cancelled attend to the reconfiguration of selfhood in an era of accelerated neoliberal globalisation. Applying a method of world literary comparativism, the paper presents close readings of folktales including “The Memory Editor”, “The Billionaire’s Sleep” and “The Recycler of Dreams”, examining Dasgupta’s folkloric depiction of the colonization of subjectivity by neoliberal contemporaneity. More broadly, the paper considers Dasgupta’s re-invigoration of archaic forms of folk orality as a tool for challenging hegemony in the contemporary world.

Works cited:

Dasgupta, Rana. 2006. “Writing Tokyo Cancelled.” In Tokyo Cancelled. London: Harper Perennial.

Dasgupta, Rana, and Travis Elborough. 2006. “Global Enchantment: Travis Elborough Talks to Rana Dasgupta.” In Tokyo Cancelled. London: Harper Perennial.

Bio: Madeleine Sinclair is an English and Comparative Literature PhD student and Wolfson Scholar at University of Warwick, UK. Her thesis focuses on the interconnections between aesthetics, politics and ecology in the twenty-first century short story-cycle.

Abstract: Who Is Allowed To Cast Spells?: Stuttering, Fluency, And Spellcasting In The Harry Potter Series

Stuttering, as defined by The Stuttering Foundation, is “a communication disorder in which the flow of speech is broken by repetitions (li-li-like this), prolongations (lllllike this), or abnormal stoppages (no sound) of sounds and syllables.” In the Harry Potter series, witches and wizards cast spells predominantly by speaking words out loud. This paper will explore boundaries in magic systems, specifically the boundary between fluent and disfluent spellcasters in the Harry Potter series, and draw attention to what’s missing in current research. Through close reading and textual analysis of the Harry Potter texts, I will compare and contrast how fluent people speak spells to the stuttering of Professor Quirrell. Because Professor Quirrell impersonated having a stutter, he does not need to worry about disfluency when casting spells. But people who have speech impediments do not have that luxury. 

This paper will acknowledge that magic in the Harry Potter series can do many wondrous things, including regrowing bones. However, because Professor Quirrell was able to convincingly impersonate someone who stutters, this implies that speech impediments still exist in the Muggle world and the wizarding world. This shows that speech impediments have not been eliminated by magic. Thus, instead of looking for ways to eliminate speech impediments using magic, this paper will also focus on spellcasting accessibility and what that could look like in fantasy texts. Furthermore, this paper will then explore the difficulty of casting nonverbal spells in the Harry Potter series and deconstruct the negative stereotypes of stuttering in fantasy spellcasting contexts. Finally, it will be acknowledged that there is ample room for disability awareness and accessibility in children’s fantasy literature.

Bio: Madeline Wahl is a postgraduate student pursuing an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Previously, she has held editorial positions at Reader’s Digest, HuffPost, and Golf Channel. She was a speaker at the Australian Speak Easy Association’s online 2020 conference and has previously written about stuttering for The Stuttering Foundation. She holds a BA in Advertising/Public Relations with a minor in Psychology and a minor in English-Writing from the University of Central Florida. She is working on her first novel in YA Fantasy and her first nonfiction book proposal on millennial caregiving.

Abstract: Challenging Energy Exuberance through Epic Fantasy: A Study of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy

This paper examines the embedded energy unconscious of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, parsing the author’s tonal depictions of energy usage alongside Frederick Buell’s 2012 essay “A Short History of Oil Cultures: or The Marriage of Exuberance and Catastrophe”. Investigating areas of “catastrophic” and “exuberant” energy exertion in the text, this paper begins by outlining the dominant oil culture in America and questioning whether epic fantasy authors—even as they construct works of petrofiction—are truly able to escape the clutches of this hegemonic perception of energy in the U.S. Positioning catastrophe as inextricably linked to depictions of oppressed magical and non-magical bodies in this trilogy, this paper ultimately outlines how Jemisin subverts the dominant American oil unconscious. I demonstrate through close reading how she textually saddles exuberance to infrastructural access and agency as well as characterizes exuberance as an inadequate tool for repairing energy-based damage. With this popular work as a case study, this presentation suggests that epic fantasy is a fruitful avenue through which to refigure the contemporary energy crisis. In exploring Jemisin’s success in creating a work of radical petrofiction, this presentation also exemplifies vital energy humanities tools for interpreting energy themes in epic fantasy–particularly concerning Max Black’s “interaction view of metaphor” and the detection of exuberance and catastrophe in texts. Finally, this paper gestures toward a progressive and energy-aware texture emerging in contemporary American epic fantasy with the growth of BIPOC-created secondary worlds. Through her work of epic petro-fantasy, Jemisin simultaneously pushes against the classically exuberant characteristics of both epic fantasy and systemic perceptions of oil in the U.S., questioning the belief that carbon consumption is a productive force across racial and socio-economic lines. This paper is an adaptation of chapter two of my MLitt Fantasy dissertation from the University of Glasgow.

Bio: Maggie White (she/her) received her undergraduate degree from Davidson College and holds an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include the energy humanities, speculative/fantastical fiction, Victorian fiction, improv and literature, posthumanism, and worldbuilding. Maggie’s core research aim is to further an understanding of speculative literature’s cultural impact, focusing largely on its role in transformative depictions of global energy dependencies and the climate crisis at large. Maggie currently lives in Mississippi with her partner, David, and her dog, Dolly.

Abstract: Stats and Soil: Race and Homeland in Fantastic Worlds

This work focuses on a persistent trope of racial worldbuilding in fantastic worlds. Nominally, such worlds operate on the premise that vastly different possibilities from our current world exist and are commonplace. However, in reality, such settings often traffic in pseudoscientific race “realism.” Built upon ahistorical notions of medieval cultures, in which nascent nation-states were racially and ethnically homogenous, racial segregation in fantastic worlds is a common and oft-neglected trope. From Middle Earth, to Skyrim, to the Forgotten Realms, fantasy settings tend to define a people by the land they occupy and the borders over which they control. Elves, Dwarves, Humans, and Orcs are associated with various topographies, blurring the line between land and people. Indeed, this trope often aligns with White supremacist ideologies which link race, place, homeland, culture, language , and civilization as synonymous and interlinked. Many worldbuilders of fantastic settings would have us believe that land and soil are deterministic and impermeable factors in the reproduction of race, language, and culture. Most contemporary audiences will associate this trope with Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings, and I will briefly touch on its reproduction over time. However, in addition to the print and media in which fantasy races are correspondingly linked to the ecosystems in which they live, virtual and analog roleplaying games embolden and further the trope in a way that scholarship hasn’t fully appreciated. This work analyzes this narrative shorthand across various artforms before examining its unique permutation in analog gaming. Then, the trope of racial bioessentialism in nation or statecraft will be compared to the rhetoric of White nationalists, especially in the context of comparisons to medievalisms, accurate or not.

Bio: Mark Hines is a PhD student in the University of Kentucky’ English Department. He is interested in the fantastic and the speculative in gaming, broadly. In particular, he examines how political and racist discourse from our world becomes shifted and blurred through representation in gaming. For speculative worlds that consistently ask “What is possible?,” he wonders why the representations of race, gender, and political dominance so often echo those of our own.

Abstract: The Sex of Angels: Nonbinary readings of otherworldly creatures in Supernatural (2005-2020) and Good Omens (2019-)

The “Sex of Angels”, or otherwise gendered understandings of otherworldly beings, is an age-old theological question. Fantasy media has interpreted and portrayed it in many ways, from the more traditional elucubrations of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) to Janet’s catchphrase “Not a girl!” in The Good Place (2016-2020). In a society that is becoming increasingly more aware of gender variances beyond the binary, the nonbinary potential of these creatures has been praised for offering representation organically but also criticised for the innate othering that comes from presenting genderlessness as a non-human feature.

This paper explores nonbinary fans’ (re)interpretations of tv angels and demons to navigate their own gender identity and/or expression. Transformative online fandom spaces are socially engineered as private, thus providing a safe space for fans to express their own queer, gender-diverse identities through storytelling.

This analysis will be done through two case studies with a widely queer fanbase – Supernatural (2005 – 2020) and Good Omens (2019-).

As a fandom born of the mid-naughts but still rather popular due to the show’s longevity, Supernatural is the ideal starting point to understand how fandom sentiments around gender representation may have shifted through the years. For instance, looking at its role in the development of widespread fandom tropes around gender dynamics such as Omegaverse.

As a more recent example, Good Omens more openly challenges assumptions about gender and has a large community of trans fan. This fandom has produced work which deconstructs gender into individual signifiers that are mixed and matched to best represent the journey, experience and sensibility of the fan artist creating it.

This analysis looks at what trans fans have to say about the gender of otherworldly creatures, as well as considering what textual elements of these shows especially appeal to said fans.

Bio: Mars Nicoli – pronouns he/him – is a PhD student in Media and GTA at Sheffield Hallam University researching transgender representation, viewership and authorship of horror. He is also interested in fan studies and specifically in fandom as a place of queer self-discovery. His Master’s thesis in Film looked at the degendering of pregnancy in Good Omens fanfiction. His work is committed to centring marginalised voices and talking with rather than about people: nothing about us without us.

Abstract: The borders of power: Superheroes and disability

Disability and superheroes may appear at first glance to be antithetical. The figure of the superhero, which as Vincent M. Gaine argues is ‘ostensibly a power fantasy’ (7), is continually aligned with strength and dominance, the centrepiece of a genre which ‘takes vigorous and potent bodies as a given’ (Alaniz 11). However, there are in fact several superhero characters in contemporary film and television with disabilities or severe health conditions, and if this seems surprising it supports David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s assertion that cultural representations of disability are prolific but go largely unnoticed by audiences (225). Mitchell and Snyder introduce a framework of ‘narrative prosthesis’, arguing that many narratives rely on disability to differentiate a central character ‘from the anonymous background of the “norm”’ (222), but that after this initial interest has been sparked, disability is often overlooked or even subject to ‘an obliteration of the difference through a “cure”’ (227).

The “curing” of disability is often literalised in superhero narratives through the gaining of superpowers (for example in the case of Captain America). However, there are occasions where disability and superpowers are allowed to coexist, including Daredevil (who is visually impaired but whose other senses are supernaturally heightened) and Professor X (who is a wheelchair user with telekinetic powers). This paper will examine these cases, exploring how superpowers and disability interact in forming these characters’ identities. In particular, it will question whether these examples can be seen as a challenge to the standard ‘vigorous and potent bodies’ of the genre or whether the addition of superpowers includes those with disabilities within this category without challenging its right to be held as the norm.

Bio: Megan Stephens (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, funded by the AHRC through the White Rose Consortium. She is researching death and grievability in contemporary fantastic film and television, exploring how the implicit cultural valuing of different types of characters is often betrayed at and confirmed by their moment of death. She is an Associate Editor at Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research.

Abstract: “And its Folks are Queerer”: Queer Marginality and the Chosen Family Dynamics of the Bagginses of Bag-End

Since the 1960s, Queer has evolved from a vague, multivalent term denoting various degrees of strangeness to a signifier of the identity politics movement, in which the term has been reclaimed as a means towards demanding representation, rights and respect from the margins of heternormative society. To be Queer in the 21st century is to exist in a state of direct confrontation against the established norms of society, but the meaning of Queer has not changed, though it has narrowed and become popularized. Though the language to describe members of the LGBTQ+ community has evolved over time, to be Queer folk has always been, at its foundations, a process of being forced into the margins of society by cultural heternormativity. It is in this forced marginality that the concept of “Found Family” has become intrinsic to the Queer community. It is through “Found Family” that people who have become alienated from their biological families, and society at large, find joy, love, acceptance and companionship in a hostile and difficult world.

Though J.R.R. Tolkien may not have been intending to create such a dynamic in The Lord of the Rings, the Bagginses of Bag-End exemplify this “Found Family” dynamic. This paper will explore the features of both Bilbo and Frodo as folk in the margins of their community, which contribute to their home being considered “a queer place, and its folk are queerer”, and how this dynamic is applicable to the 20th-century queer experience. The paper will then consider why Tolkien wrote the Bagginses in this manner, and how the universal themes of Love and Fellowship may have resonated through “Found Family” to an English Catholic who lost much of his own biological family at a young age.

Bio: Mercury Natis (they/them) is a student of Imaginative Literature at Signum University, focusing on Tolkien Studies and Queer Theory. They hold a previous MA in Museum Education and a BA in Art History. Their primary focus is on queer resonances in interwar fantasy, in the pre-identity politics age of ambiguity and disruption. They have previously presented at Oxonmoot on the similarities between Tolkien’s perspective on fantasy and Sontag’s essay on Camp, and are currently preparing a paper for publication on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King as a work of Camp art.

Abstract: “síneadh eile lenár dtraidisiún scéalaíochta”: Fantasy and “Celtic” tradition

In this paper, I explore the relationship between genre fantasy and the “traditional” literatures — both premodern and modern — of Celtic-language communities, which have for more than two hundred years been used (and misused) by writers of fantasy and related genres in dominant languges. Rather than approaching this question through an analysis of dominant-language texts, however, I want to approach it, instead, through modern Celtic-language literatures. I focus in this paper on Darach Ó Scolaí’s Táin Bó Cuailnge (2017) and Fionnlagh MacLeòid’s Gormshuil an Rìgh (2010). Ó Scolaí’s preface describes his work, a modern Irish-language version of the best-known medieval Gaelic narrative, as “síneadh eile lenár dtraidisiún scéalaíochta” [another extension of our narrative tradition] (2017, 7), and MacLeòid’s novel mimics both the form and style of a Scottish Gaelic oral narrative. My central questions are: can we read these texts as fantasy, and what does it mean for us to do so?

I consider two aspects of these texts in particular: their relation to “traditional” narrative forms (the medieval hero-tale, the modern oral folktale) and their relationship to modern literary forms (the novel, genre fantasy). How do these two texts situate themselves — formally, stylistically, paratextually, and contextually — in relation to the “Celtic” traditions they draw on? How, conversely, are they situated, whether intentionally or simply by virtue of being produced and read in the twenty-first century, in relation to the novel form, and to the fantasy genre in particular? What differentiates these texts from so-called “Celtic fantasy” in dominant languages? How might these texts — and other examples of the growing body of fantasy in the modern Celtic languages — enable us to think in new ways about dominant-language Celtic fantasy and its complex and often problematic relationship to Celtic-language communities in the present?

Bio: Nathaniel Harrington received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Toronto. His dissertation looked at the representations of reading in and real-world reading practices for fantasy and science fiction in Scottish Gaelic and English. His current projects consider the relationship between language death and speculative fiction and the development of (quote-unquote) “Celtic fantasy”. His other interests include Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, contemporary denied-language poetics, Gaelic literary history, and meeting new cats.

Abstract: The Cracks Within: Liminality and Hero-making in Fantasy

Farah Mendlesohn defines liminal fantasy “relies, after all on a knowingness” on the part of both the reader and the characters within the story (Mendlesohn 182). The ambiguity between our expectations of the real and the fantastical is where liminality lies, and where one can experience “what it’s like to have fallen into the crack” (Mendlesohn 183). The chasm of knowingness, or lack thereof, between the real world and the fantastical or between our expectations of genre tropes and narrative structures, all embody that “crack” where the fantastic is experienced.

In a slight departure Mendlesohn’s idea, Gaiman introduces Neverwhere (1996) as a story about “people who fall through the cracks” (Gaiman, iv). In doing so, Gaiman’s perspective shifts liminality away from a representation of the space between worlds to the ambiguity of identity and knowability within a character.

Here, I explore how “heroes” are formed of those who “fall through the cracks”. They are neither of one world nor the other, and embody that crack, chasm, or liminality within themselves. In Neverwhere Richard Mayhew feels like he belongs nowhere, either in his unexciting everyday life or as an outsider in London Below. In Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, the antagonist, the Shadow, is an outward manifestation of the hollowness and not-knowing of the protagonist, Sparrowhawk, himself.

I argue that the gap in knowing, as it plays out within a character in a story, is itself a liminal space where the fantastic becomes possible. To support my argument, I will look at the characters of Richard Mayhew (from Neverwhere), Sparrowhawk (from A Wizard of Earthsea), Sam Vymes (from Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!), and Jonathan Strange (from Suzanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) and explore the different ways each of these characters contain within themselves and embody a fantastical liminal space.

Bio: I did my MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, on the non-anthropocentric rhetoric of popular fantasy in the 20th Century. I currently work as a freelance academic editor. My academic interests center around exploring how each instance of rhetoric shapes and questions the enclosing genre or archive, by focusing on fictionality. I also moonlight on Instagram as a dog mom, and part-time selfie enthusiast who maps cities on foot.

Abstract: We’re All Mad Queer: Breaching the Boundaries of Sanity and Sex in Wonderland and Oz

Narratives of difference are immensely popular in children’s literature. The figure of the eternal child in Peter Pan; the talking animals of Narnia; Harry Potter’s whimsical world of witchcraft and wizardry, all involve two crucial elements. What is the use of a book, without alterity and wonder? When burying their nose into a book, one might hope to transcend the everyday, and instead embody various fantastic creatures. One might hope, then, to become something different.

Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ series and L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series have been read and loved for centuries by children and adults alike. Both have also seen numerous adaptations, from the literary, to musicals, to plays and films. As a result, both are boundary-breaching texts. These ‘external’ boundaries, of readership and medium, are also reflected within the texts themselves: alongside fluidity in language and narrative comes fluidity in representations of various categories of difference.

This paper examines the interconnections between madness and queerness in the ‘Alice’ and ‘Oz’ texts. Various sociological studies have illuminated the socially constructed nature of both sexuality and sanity, but few have examined the crossover between the two, especially in relation to literary representations. Children’s books, which routinely render real-world norms topsy-turvy, are a strong place to start. Counter to narratives of fear that inflect discourses around madness, sexuality, and childhood, Alice and Oz celebrate alterity of various kinds, equating madness and queerness with play and opposing dominant cultural perceptions of deviance. Through analyses of iconographies of madness; depictions of chronoanormativity and queer time; and readings of the formations of queer relationships to ‘others’ and to gender, this paper will consider how madness and queerness are represented and intertwined in these enduring fantasy texts.

Bio: Rachel Milne is a Visiting Lecturer at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She holds a BA (Hons) in Media from Queen Margaret University, and an MLitt in Comparative Literature from the University of Glasgow. Her work primarily centres around representations of otherness in children’s literature and film, especially in relation to queerness, disability, and neurodivergence. Her writings on childhood and difference in literature and film have been published in peer-reviewed journals and blogs, and she has presented her work on Disney and disability, queerness in African cinema, childhood in Scottish film, and otherness in children’s literature, at various international conferences.

Abstract: A Conspiracy of Bodies: Negating Sexual Anthropocentrism

The tradition of the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ narrative – one where a beautiful, often female, human falls for a truly monstrous figure, often a man – is one that has persisted in the cultural imagination ever since Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve wrote her original version in 1740, following in the tradition of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. However, the cultural opinions on sex and sexuality have to come to fluctuate significantly over the following years. As fantasy erotica becomes an emergent subgenre within the field, sexual behaviour comes to the forefront. This paper will seek to explore the cultural implications of monster-human erotica and the practice of teratophilia in literature and media. The tracing of desire through the constructed monstrous body raises questions of what the body is and the wider cultural discourse around acceptable societal standards. By discussing monster media such as Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water’, Marvel’s ‘Venom’, and China Miéville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’, this paper will utilise theories of anthropocentrism and sexuality studies to explore why exactly the monstrous, hybrid bodies of fantastic media trigger desire within the audience – and the radical potential of such an act.

Bio: Rebecca Gault is an early-career academic from Glasgow, Scotland. She has a MA in English Literature from the University of Glasgow and a MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include monstrosity, gender and sexuality studies, the construction of the body, and modes of fantasy. She is currently the co-host of Out To Get You, a podcast examining horror media through the lens of marginalised experiences, and often writes about horror, fantasy, and comic books.

Abstract: “I Don’t Wanna Become a Demon”: Rethinking Binaries in Princess Mononoke and Okja

Fantasy can be effective as a mode of destabilizing and problematizing binary thinking (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, center/periphery for instance). Although separated by two decades, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017) pivot around the common theme of converting the nonhuman into marketable materials. This paper engages with the selected films in order to explore the material as well as metaphorical borders of the Anthropocene discourse that normalize and justify exploitation, instrumentalization and extraction of the nonhuman ones for the sole purpose of fueling the capitalist engine of so-called growth. Additionally, this paper thinks through and about extraction, thereby seeks to answer why and how the human/nonhuman binary is required for the biopolitical authorities to justify extraction and hyper-consumption of the nonhuman. Reading through an ecofeminist lens, the paper scrutinizes the techno-fixes proposed and practiced by the authority and argues for epistemological rethinking to conceive of alternative future(s) free of extractive hegemony that relies heavily on the human/nonhuman binary. To do so, the paper discusses: First, how do San in Princess Mononoke and Mija in Okja defy the binary by siding with the nonhuman and against the ‘demonic’ industrial forces as represented by Lady Eboshi and Lucy Mirando respectively. Second, how Lady Eboshi and Lucy Mirando’s absolute disregard for nonhuman agency is propelled not only by their goal of endless resource extraction but also their anthropocentric ideology that allows them to exploit and abuse the nonhumans as commodities. While the adults are entirely driven by techno-capitalist lust and are ignorant of the horrific outcome of such extractive practices, the children initiate epistemological rethinking by building kinship with the nonhuman to ensure a more inclusive and compassionate society where the humans can live harmoniously with their planetary partners.

Bio: Sababa Monjur is currently enrolled as a doctoral student at Philipps University Marburg. She completed her MA in North American Studies from the same institute. Her research interest includes SF, popular culture, gender studies, environmental studies and ecofeminism. The latter area is the focus of her dissertation. She is the recipient of ICCS Graduate Scholarship 2022.

Abstract: Settler Fairies: Postcolonial Implications of Fairies in America

In The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Brian Attebery notes that many of the European settlers in North America left their traditional supernatural stories behind when they emigrated. Apparently, the New World was not congenial to fairies and suchlike (20). In contemporary American fantasy, however, the continent is abundantly populated with fairy creatures of all shapes and sizes. Often, they are depicted as immigrants themselves, having crossed the mighty boundary of the Atlantic to colonize America alongside the human settlers who believed in them.

In my paper, I will discuss four novels which use the motif of fairies as European immigrants to America, analysing the implications of this motif from a postcolonial perspective. Firstly, I consider Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks and Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child. In these novels, fairy creatures of European descent are the only supernatural beings encountered; there is no indication of the existence of indigenous spirits. In this way, I argue, Bull’s and Donohue’s novels participate in the erasure of indigenous stories and perpetuate conceptions of pre-colonial America as an unclaimed wilderness.

Secondly, I turn to two novels where the fairies’ settler status is given thematic weight. In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, fairies such as piskies and leprechauns are depicted alongside a large variety of supernatural beings from multiple cultural contexts. The main story is repeatedly interrupted by interludes which describe the arrival of these beings in America at different points in history, thus emphasising America’s status as a cultural melting pot. Charles de Lint, in Widdershins, goes further still, depicting a long-standing and bitter conflict between colonising fairies and indigenous spirits. In Gaiman’s and de Lint’s novels, folkloric motifs are employed to tell stories which attempt to take into consideration the complex and tangled colonial history of America and all of its peoples.

Bio: Saga Bokne is a PhD student in English literature at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is particularly interested in how folklore and mythology are reused and reinterpreted in contemporary fantasy. She is also very interested in the politics and ideology of fantasy. At Karlstad university, she teaches courses in children’s literature and academic writing, among other things. Her doctoral dissertation will be about the depictions and functions of fairies in post-Tolkienian fantasy literature.

Abstract: “To Win or Lose a Great Game”: Board Games, Seth Dickinson’s “Masquerade” Series, and Policing Fantasy’s Political Boundaries

Board game imagery is a common feature of fantasy literature, with the language of moves, countermoves, gambits, and endgames often used within fantasy texts to shape a reader’s understanding of political strategy and plays for power. This paper explores the role of such game-inflected imagery in delimiting the boundaries of the political change presented as legible, believable, or possible in the fantasy genre. I take as a case study Seth Dickinson’s “The Masquerade”, a fantasy series dense with board game imagery. Dickinson uses board games, with their associations of neat, schematised worlds and strategies, to invoke a specific model of political change: one where the world is figured as rational and rewritable, a board to be manipulated by a sufficiently clever player of the political game. However, as the series progresses, Dickinson invites the reader to interrogate the link between this game-inflected model of political change and the imperial ideology “The Masquerade” seeks to challenge. He does so by exploring the boundaries placed on action and agency by a game-inflected model of change: as one character points out, to beat a master at their own game, one is forced to play by their rules, accepting the possibility space of the board instead of reaching across the table to slit the other player’s throat. By tracing the shifting associations and logics of board game imagery in “The Masquerade”, I explore what it means that fantasy literature so often shapes the reader’s understanding of political change through imagery of rulesets, board edges, and boundaries on political action, uncovering the relationship between the board game and the fantasy genre’s oft-cited ability to envision alternative political structures.

Bio: Samantha Hammond is a researcher interested in the intersections between literature and gaming, and in the role of space, systems thinking, and political change in both forms. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Class I Honours in English Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Writing, Editing, and Publishing from the University of Queensland. During her undergraduate studies, she presented at two symposia and was awarded several prizes, including the Steele Rudd Memorial Essay Prize for best essay in Australian literature. She is currently studying a Master of Theatre (Dramaturgy) at the University of Melbourne.

Suzanne R. Black

Abstract: Canon(n)s in the Distance: Black Sails Fanfiction, Decolonial Gothic and the Negotiation of Canon

Fanfiction texts necessarily replicate canonical elements from the media texts they rewrite while changing some aspects of the characters, setting or plots. One criticism that is often aimed at fanfiction is that it tends to be conservative rather than progressive when dealing with racial issues (Lothian & Stanfill, 2021). I identify several works of fanfiction related to the television series Black Sails (2014-2017) – itself related to Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island (1883) – in which the boundaries of the Gothic genre of fantasy and their transgressions are used to reckon with race and racism.

Fanfiction’s tendency to minimise issues of race and racism emerge as genre interruptions in keeping with the Gothic tradition where “In seeing one time and its values cross into another, both periods are disturbed. The dispatching of unwanted ideas and attitudes into an imagined past does not guarantee they have been overcome” (Botting, 2013, p.3). The Decolonial Gothic, in particular, is an effective strategy for this as it can “mobilise supernatural figurations of threat and anxiety to grapple not with colonialism or its aftereffects, but with coloniality as the enduring alliance between Eurocentric master narratives of race, gender and nature, and capitalism as a set of economic/ecological relations that link regions and communities unequally together” (Duncan, 2022, p.319). I argue that Black Sails fanfiction cannot escape being haunted by its literary and historical forebears and these spectres often manifest as genre play.

Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 2013.

Duncan, Rebecca. ‘Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies’. Gothic Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 2022, pp. 304–22.

Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. ‘An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction’s Digital Infrastructure’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 36, Sept. 2021.

Bio: Suzanne R Black is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. With a background in English Literature, she combines humanities approaches with digital methods, and has worked across a range of projects involving data and the creative industries. Her research interests lie in digital literary culture and the development of data-led approaches to contemporary fiction and fanfiction. She has published work in Transformative Works and Cultures, FORUM, The American Reader, The Journal of Fandom Studies and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture (forthcoming).

Abstract: Flower of Knights, Knight of Flowers: Transgression of Gendered Boundaries in Retellings of the Tale of Peredur

Peredur, or Perceval, has been a figure associated with the transgression of gendered boundaries since his early appearances in Monmouth and The Mabinogion. Peredur, Son of Efrawg, raised in seclusion by his mother, had trouble integrating into the masculine world of chivalry. His tale in The Mabinogion explores this through medieval Welsh understandings of masculinity, with traits such as facial hair and honour explicitly linked. His treatment of women, too, is outside the boundary of what is expected of him as a man and as a knight, and there is what can be interpreted as a queer homosocial relationship between Peredur and Gwalchmei (or Gawain), further transgressing the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity. More modern reinterpretations of the character, in Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur (2007) and Nicola Griffith’s Spear (2022), draw on these notes of gendered dissonance and cast the character as a trans woman in post-Roman Britain (Reeve) and as a butch woman who is ambivalent to gender (Griffith). I am particularly interested in examining how Reeve perhaps inadvertently sets up a dialogue between biologically essentialist views of gender and cultural views of gender. His Peredur, or Peri for short, is born a boy, raised as a girl, lives as a man among Arthur’s warband, then ends the novel living as a woman. Both Reeve and Griffith use what has historically been a mode of storytelling associated with masculinity and particularly chivalric masculinity to explore femininity and gender fluidity, and both use the fantastical in their stories as a lens through which to examine gendered boundaries.

This paper will argue that queerness and gendered transgression are threaded through even the earliest parts of the Arthurian canon, and will trace these roots into modern retellings to examine what they’ve grown into.

Bio: Tam Moules has an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow and a BA (Hons) in English Literature from Anglia Ruskin University. Their research is currently focused on queerness in Arthuriana, and they have previously presented papers at the 2019 Fantastika and Fabled Coast Conferences, Glasgow’s GifCon in 2018 and 2019, and Open Graves Open Minds 2021, as well as co-hosted writing workshops at the LSFRC’s Productive Futures conference and Cymera Festival.

Abstract: Unicorn Variations: Continuity and Change in the Many Versions of The Last Unicorn

Over the past fifty years and more since its first publication, Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel The Last Unicorn has led a far from marginal life in fantasy, nestled firmly near the center of any conception of the genre as a “fuzzy set” despite its metafictional dimensions. If the novel most diverges from the Tolkienian model of fantasy in its use of both humor and metafiction, Beagle ultimately offers a theory of fantasy of his own via that very metafiction, and a theory of fantasy that arrives at many of the same conclusions as Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” by other means. The novel’s many adaptations, abridgements, and even abortive early drafts have received far less attention, however, and lurked more furtively on the edges of fantasy and indeed Beagle’s own long career. This paper will therefore emphasize how these threads of metafiction and self-reflexive commentary on fantasy run through and become refracted across not only the 1982 animated adaptation of The Last Unicorn, but also the more recent graphic novel version; Beagle’s other unicorn stories (inside and outside the same universe); and the earlier fragmentary draft of the novel later published as “The Lost Version.” Across these variations on and responses to the original narrative, we find an emergent concern with change itself connected to the novel’s ruminations on the desire for immortality and the inability to change associated with its villainous figures.

Bio: Timothy S. Miller teaches both medieval literature and modern speculative fiction as Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where he contributes to the department’s MA degree concentration in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Recent graduate course titles include “Theorizing the Fantastic” and “Artificial Intelligence in Literature and Film.” He has written on both later Middle English literature and various contemporary authors of fantasy and science fiction, and his book Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’: A Critical Companion will be published in March of 2023. His current major project explores representations of plants and modes of plant being in literature and culture.

Abstract: The Porous House: Investigating the House as a Space of the Fantastic in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline

In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) the house is a significant element in the story which propels the narrative forward. In this paper, I seek to investigate the house as not just a space which hosts the fantastic element, but also as a fantastic entity in its own right. At the physical level, a house consists of a network of several thresholds – windows, doors and corridors. These boundaries act as reference points which provide a stable and coherent sense of reality. Our understanding of inside and outside, far and near depends on the inherent stability of these boundaries.

In Coraline however, these boundaries become strangely porous. The door-in-the-wall which opens up to a dark-hallway, the ever-changing primal tunnel, are some instances when the threshold becomes unreliable. When Coraline crosses the tunnel and enters the other-house, she finds herself in another room. She leaves an inside and emerges at ‘another’ inside. The spatial dichotomy of in/out becomes obsolete: since ‘inside’ does not exist anymore for her, ‘outside’ loses its meaning as well. This paper argues that the boundaries in the house do not just function as a border between the real and fantastic terrain, in face they themselves become the agent of transgression. And in doing so they threaten to make the objective reality unstable too.

Furthermore, if the self and space are interdependent entities, what happens to the former when it is deprived of objective boundaries. Does the distinction between the two collapse utterly? Coraline can interact with non-human entities in the other house. Does it suggest that the boundaries between the human and non-human have dissolved? How do we define the human then? Ultimately this paper through the work of select scholars investigates the house as an interstitial entity that defies any easy categorisation.

Bio: Vaibhav Dwivedi is an Assistant Professor of English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. His research interests include Cartography in Literature, Film Studies and Fantasy Literature.

Abstract: Boundary Between the Human and the Inhuman in Arthur C. Clarke’s and Liu Cixin’s Science Fiction

This paper will examine the boundary between the human and the inhuman in the science fiction novels by Arthur C. Clarke, a representative figure of Golden Age science fiction, and Liu Cixin, a prominent contemporary Chinese science fiction writer. The two authors are especially worth comparing because of Liu Cixin’s self-proclaimed admiration for and imitation of Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction. Both Clarke and Liu see humanity’s relocation from Earth to space as the catalyst for the fundamental transformation of the human into the inhuman, where humanity becomes equally, if not more alien than extraterrestrial intelligence. Clarke and Liu start from some common premises when dealing with this subject: they are both concerned with the theme of childhood, which establishes “the human” as a stage of civilisational childhood or adolescence to be outgrown when the human transforms into the inhuman; and they both believe in the inherent adaptability and malleability of human nature that makes the transformation into the inhuman possible. However, Clarke envisions human metamorphosis into the inhuman as evolutionary progress, whereas Liu depicts humans in space discarding their humanity as an inevitable sacrifice and moral degradation. This discrepancy in their characterisation of the inhuman is predicated on the fact that Clarke mainly treats “human” as a biological concept, in the sense that the transformation into the inhuman is characterised by liberation from human biological limitations, but Liu treats “human” as a moral concept and defines human nature by the moral values that the human race upholds. I will explore the social, historical, and literary factors that contribute to the discrepancies in Clarke’s and Liu’s understanding of the boundary between the human and the inhuman and the transgression of such boundary.

Bio: Xiuqi Huang is a fourth-year PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on transhumanism, non-human sentience and extraterrestrial life in Chinese and Anglophone science fiction. She is keen on exploring the boundary between the human and the inhuman, in the hope of shedding more light on the ever changing perception of what it is to be human against the imagination of the inhuman.

Abstract: Re/discovering Women in Chinese Taoist Myth: New Gods: Yang Jian

In this paper, I analyse New Gods: Yang Jian (2022), a Chinese animation film that retells Taoist myth in a post-Ragnarök-alike background. The film is adapted from The Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi, 封神榜), a 16th-century Chinese novel that contains Taoist folklore, fantasy and myth. In this paper, I examine the relationship between the protagonist Yang Jian, a central deity member in Taoist myth, with his nephew Chen Xiang. Specifically, I focus on Yang’s gendered role as a maternal uncle to take care of and guild his nephew to rescue female family members whereas father characters in the Yang family are completely dismissed.

In doing so, I delineate the matriarchal familial relation of the Yang family in the film and how such a structure distinguishes from that of The Investiture of the Gods. Unlike the original story, the Yangs becomes one of the leading forces to build a matriarchal god order against the current patriarchal one, which explicates the fall of the deity in the film. By re-interpreting The Investiture of the Gods, the film production team tries to re-represent traditional myths with new gender relationships in the 21st century China.

Furthermore, I contextualise the film in the history of the film adaption of The Investiture of the Gods, beginning in 1999. By historicising the film, I argue the film director re/discovers ancient Chinese imagination of a celestial matriarchy buried in The Investiture of the Gods. More importantly, however, the film speaks for current film producers’ ambitions to go beyond Anglo-American fantasy-film paradigm and re-create a Chinese deity/superhero. Unlike their forerunners in the 1990s, the young generation of filmmakers intends to build a new superhero cinematic universe where the Chinese deity/superheroes, unlike those by Marvel and D.C Studios, are inherently anti-patriarchal.

Bio: Yimin Xu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Humanities and Languages at University of New South Wales, Australia, supervised by A/Prof. Zheng Yi, Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards and Dr. Wang Ping. Her research interest is gender in Chinese science fiction, Chinese fantastical literature and modern Chinese popular culture. Her current PhD project focuses on the concept of Chinese modernity reflected from gender representations in contemporary Chinese fantastical literature. Moreover, she examines national memories of China’s semi-colonisation history in the late 19th century embedded in current Chinese fantastical literature writing.

GIFCon 2023 Keynotes and Reading Suggestions

Event registration can be found  here .  The Programme can be found here . Abstracts and Speaker Bios can be found here .  Workshops and Roundtables can be found here .

Dr. Will Tattersdill

‘breathe deep, seek peace’: the fantasy/science boundary, especially as it applies to dinosaurs  .

phd creative writing glasgow university

Will Tattersdill (he/him) is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Fantasy at Glasgow University, and the author of Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge UP, 2016). He has taught and written on alternate history, museology, and animals in Star Trek , and is currently editing H. G. Wells for the Oxford World’s Classics series. His first children’s choose-your-own-adventure book (co-written with Sarah Crofton) will be published by Usborne this July. 

In the 181 years since they were formally named, dinosaurs have become almost synonymous with genre fiction. To find one in a text is to understand that text as sci fi, fantasy, horror; so-called realist literature stays well away from them. This is curious because dinosaurs are real – ideas extracted from the Earth, impossible without the methods and institutions of modern science. In this lecture, I’ll talk about how dinosaurs can be used to trouble the notion that fantasy always escapes, presenting the boundary between science and the imagination as pliable and generative rather than staunch and forbidding. My focal text with be Dinotopia , James Gurney’s iconic 1992 vision of a world where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony. 

Suggested Reading List

  • Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press  by Dr. Will Tattersdill
  • Dinotopia by James Gurney
  • Literature and science: a reader’s guide to essential criticis by Martin Willis’s (in the University of Glasgow library  here ).
  • The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science by Ralph O’Connor 
  •   Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History by Lukas Rieppel.

‘A Fantastic Conversation’

Nghi Vo became a writer because while there were alternatives, none of them suited her as well as a lifetime of endless research combined with simply making things up.  

She is the author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and The Singing Hills Cycle, including The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain . 

phd creative writing glasgow university

Suggested Reading List (all authored by Nghi Vho!)

  • The Empress of Salt and Fortune  (2020)
  • When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain  (2020)
  • Into the Riverlands  (2022)
  • The Chosen and the Beautiful  (2021)
  • Siren Queen  (2022)

Dr. Sami Schalk

‘reimagining bodyminds and liberation in pandemic times’.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Dr. Sami Schalk (she/her) is an associate professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of  Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction  (Duke 2018) and  Black Disability Politics  (Duke 2022). Dr. Schalk’s academic work focuses on race, disability, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She also writes for mainstream outlets, including a monthly column called “Pleasure Practices” in  TONE Madison . Dr. Schalk identifies as a fat, Black, queer, disabled femme and a pleasure activist. 

Drawn from the book Bodyminds Reimagined , this talk will explore how science and speculative media can challenge our understandings of social issues and how these new understandings can expand our imaginative potential and be applied to real world work for social change. 

  • Black Disability Politics by Dr. Sami Schalk
  • Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction by Dr. Sami Schalk
  • A collection of articles by Dr. Sami Schalk can be found here
  • Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
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University of Aberdeen

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Creative Writing

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  • Postgraduate Research
  • Our Research Areas

Introduction

Our Creative Writing PhD programme offers a dedicated, supportive and multi-award winning team of full-time supervisory staff specialising in poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose.

Study Information

At a glance, want to know more.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Our writers include internationally renowned novelist Alan Warner (author of Morvern Callar, The Sopranos and The Stars in the Bright Sky as well as film and stage adaptations of his work); David Wheatley (author of Mocker, A Nest on the Waves and The President of Planet Earth, and a 2015 judge of the National Poetry Competition); Helen Lynch (author of The Elephant and the Polish Question and Tea for the Rent Boy); Wayne Price (author of Furnace, Mercy Seat and the Laureate’s Choice poetry collection Fossil Record); Alan Marcus (filmmaker of In Place of Death, The New Colossus and 216 Beach Walk, Waikiki) and Shane Strachan (author of DWAMS and Nevertheless: Sparkian Tales in Bulawayo).

The University of Aberdeen offers a rich and unique variety of inter-disciplinary creative opportunities based on the University’s centres of research excellence such as the WORD Centre for Creative Writing , The Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (host of visiting writers such as Michael Longley and James Kelman), the Centre for the Novel (host of visiting writers such as Michele Roberts, Janice Galloway and Will Self), and the Sir Herbert Grierson Centre .

Our postgraduate programmes host masterclasses from world-class visiting writers (recent workshops have featured Claire Keegan, Don Paterson and Simon Armitage) and The WORD Centre organises a number of highly popular literary events each year as part of the University’s May Fest. The Centre also fosters many active and productive links with the wider writing community of the north east.

PGR students may opt to study part-time or full-time, and all successful applicants are considered for competitive bursary funding. We are open to discussing all potential projects with applicants, including the possibility of undertaking these via Distance Learning.

Approaches from applicants who wish to undertake their studies as Distance Learners will be considered, subject to discussion with an appropriate supervisor

Our Research

David Wheatley is a poet and critic with particular research interests in the field of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Samuel Beckett. As well as Creative Writing applications in poetry and translation, he welcomes applications from prospective PhD students in the above research areas.

In Creative Writing, Helen Lynch has research and practical expertise in short fiction, nature writing, life writing, travel writing, and fictional autobiography. She also has strong research interests in the literature and politics of the early modern period (especially Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare and the connections between them).

Wayne Price's research interests include practice-based research in fiction, particularly realism, postmodernism, regional literatures and short story theory and practice.

Alan Marcus engages with different methodological approaches to creative non-fiction filmmaking, with an interest in documentary, the essay film, experimental film and drama. His research incorporates cinematic storytelling involving post-traumatic sites and marginalized communities. Thematically, his work is often located in the visualisation of urban environments in conflict settings, in addition to research on differing perceptions of the landscape and notions of home and displacement.

Alan Warner is interested in Creative Writing research projects (generally in prose), across all genres, especially literary fiction, short stories, or thriller, crime, fantasy, science fiction, memoir and non-fiction.

Shane Strachan’s practice-based research interests include prose fiction (particularly short fiction), creative non-fiction (across forms), poetry (including spoken word) and multidisciplinary projects working with other artforms such as visual arts and design, theatre and music. He also has research interests in Scottish Literature, the Scots language (including translation), and writing in regional dialects.

Potential Supervisors

  • Dr Helen Lynch
  • Dr Wayne Price
  • Mr Alan Warner
  • Dr David Wheatley
  • Professor Alan Marcus
  • Dr Shane Strachan

Entry Requirements

Our minimum requirement is a 2:1 Hons degree or better in a cognate discipline (such as Creative Writing, English Literature, or other literature-focused discipline). Strong performance at PGT level (folio dissertation at Merit or above) is strongly preferred but not essential if UG performance has been outstanding.

Where applicants possess relevant professional expertise (such as in Journalism or accredited authorship), the degree requirement may be waived, but this would only apply where applicants can clearly demonstrate an ability to work at an advanced level in both creative practice and academic research.

International Applicants

  • Information about visa and immigration requirements
  • Information regarding country-specific entry requirements

Fees and Funding

Please refer to our InfoHub Tuition Fees page for fee information for this Research Area.

Further Information about tuition fees and the cost of living in Aberdeen

Our Funding Database

View all funding options in our Funding Database .

Graduates go into Public/Private Sector Accounting and Management, Fund Management, Stockbroking, Investment Analysis, Banking and Financial Services and Academia.

Get in Touch

Contact details.

The University of Edinburgh home

  • Schools & departments

Postgraduate study

Creative Writing PhD

Awards: PhD

Study modes: Full-time, Part-time

Funding opportunities

Programme website: Creative Writing

Postgraduate Discovery Day

Join us online on Wednesday 21 February to learn about student life, how to apply, and more.

See the full schedule and register

Research profile

The PhD in Creative Writing offers committed and talented writers the opportunity to study Creative Writing at the highest level.

Supported by an expert supervisory team you will work independently towards the production of a substantial, publishable piece of creative writing, accompanied by a sustained exercise in critical study.

The academic staff you will be working with are all active researchers or authors, including well-published and prize-winning writers of poetry, prose, fiction and drama. They include:

  • Dr Jane Alexander - Fiction
  • Dr Lynda Clark - Fiction
  • Dr Patrick Errington - Poetry
  • Dr Miriam Gamble - Poetry
  • Dr Alan Gillis - Poetry
  • Nicola McCartney - Drama
  • Dr Jane McKie - Poetry
  • Dr Allyson Stack - Fiction
  • Kim Sherwood - Fiction
  • Alice Thompson - Fiction

Find out more about the programme and our team

Training and support

We encourage you to share your research and learn from the work of others through a programme of seminars and visiting speakers.

We have an in-house Writer-in-Residence, annual writing prizes, and a range of opportunities to learn from experts in the publishing industry.

We also offer access to opportunities provided by the Sottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities.

Our postgraduate journal, Forum, is a valuable conduit for research findings and provides an opportunity to gain editorial experience.

  • Forum: postgraduate journal of culture and the arts

A UNESCO World City of Literature, Edinburgh is a remarkable place to study, write, publish, discuss and perform prose, poetry and drama.

Take a PhD with us and you will be based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) in the historic centre of this world-leading festival city.

Our buildings are close to:

  • National Library of Scotland (where collections include the Bute Collection of early modern English drama and the John Murray Archive)
  • Edinburgh Central Library
  • Scottish Poetry Library
  • Scottish Storytelling Centre
  • Writers’ Museum
  • Traverse Theatre

We have strong links with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which annually welcomes around 1,000 authors to our literary city.

There are lots of opportunities to write and share your work, from Forum to The Selkie, which was founded by Creative Writing students in 2018 to showcase work by people who self-identify as underrepresented.

Around the city, you’ll find library readings and bookshop launches, spoken word gigs, cabaret nights and poetry slams, including events run by celebrated publishing outlets, from Canongate and Polygon / Birlinn to Luath Press, 404 Ink, Taproot Press and Mariscat.

You will have access to the University’s many literary treasures, which include:

  • William Drummond library
  • Lewis Grassic Gibbon library
  • Hugh MacDiarmid library
  • Norman MacCaig library
  • W.H. Auden collection
  • Corson collection
  • works by and about Sir Walter Scott
  • Ramage collection of poetry pamphlets

The Centre for Research Collections also holds a truly exceptional collection of early Shakespeare quartos and other early modern printed plays. These have been put together by the 19th century Shakespearean James Halliwell-Phillipps, the correspondence of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (the focus of one of the major editorial projects in Victorian studies of the last half-century), and the extensive Laing collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts.

You will also have access to letters and papers by - and relating to - authors including:

  • Christopher Isherwood
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • John Middleton Murry
  • Walter de la Mare
  • George Mackay Brown
  • Compton Mackenzie

Many of the University's Special Collections are digitised and available online from our excellent Resource Centre, Computing Labs, and dedicated PhD study space in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC).

Look inside the PhD study space in LLC

Entry requirements

These entry requirements are for the 2024/25 academic year and requirements for future academic years may differ. Entry requirements for the 2025/26 academic year will be published on 1 Oct 2024.

A UK masters degree, or its international equivalent, in creative writing, normally with distinction.

We may also consider your application if you have equivalent qualifications or experience. For additional information please refer to the pre-application guidance in the 'How to apply' section.

International qualifications

Check whether your international qualifications meet our general entry requirements:

  • Entry requirements by country
  • English language requirements

Regardless of your nationality or country of residence, you must demonstrate a level of English language competency at a level that will enable you to succeed in your studies.

English language tests

We accept the following English language qualifications at the grades specified:

  • IELTS Academic: total 7.0 with at least 6.5 in each component.
  • TOEFL-iBT (including Home Edition): total 100 with at least 23 in each component. We do not accept TOEFL MyBest Score to meet our English language requirements.
  • C1 Advanced ( CAE ) / C2 Proficiency ( CPE ): total 185 with at least 176 in each component.
  • Trinity ISE : ISE III with passes in all four components.
  • PTE Academic: total 70 with at least 62 in each component.

Your English language qualification must be no more than three and a half years old from the start date of the programme you are applying to study, unless you are using IELTS , TOEFL, Trinity ISE or PTE , in which case it must be no more than two years old.

Degrees taught and assessed in English

We also accept an undergraduate or postgraduate degree that has been taught and assessed in English in a majority English speaking country, as defined by UK Visas and Immigration:

  • UKVI list of majority English speaking countries

We also accept a degree that has been taught and assessed in English from a university on our list of approved universities in non-majority English speaking countries (non-MESC).

  • Approved universities in non-MESC

If you are not a national of a majority English speaking country, then your degree must be no more than three and a half years old at the beginning of your programme of study.

Find out more about our language requirements:

Fees and costs

Scholarships and funding, featured funding.

There are a number of scholarship schemes available to eligible candidates on this PhD programme, including awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Please be advised that many scholarships have more than one application stage, and early deadlines.

  • Find out more about scholarships in literatures, languages and cultures

Other funding opportunities

Search for scholarships and funding opportunities:

  • Search for funding

Further information

  • Phone: +44 (0)131 650 4086
  • Contact: [email protected]
  • School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures
  • 50 George Square
  • Central Campus
  • Programme: Creative Writing
  • School: Literatures, Languages & Cultures
  • College: Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Select your programme and preferred start date to begin your application.

PhD Creative Writing - 3 Years (Full-time)

Phd creative writing - 6 years (part-time), application deadlines.

Due to high demand, the school operates a number of selection deadlines. We will make a small number of offers to the most outstanding candidates on an ongoing basis, but hold the majority of applications until the next published selection deadline when we will offer a proportion of the places available to applicants selected through a competitive process.

Deadlines for applicants applying to study in 2024/25:

  • How to apply

You must submit two references with your application.

  • Pre-application guidance

Before you formally apply for this PhD, you should look at the pre-application information and guidance on the programme website.

This will help you decide if this programme is right for you, and help us gain a clearer picture of what you hope to achieve.

The guidance details the writing samples you should send us as part of your application (either fiction or poetry, along with a shorter sample of your academic writing).

It will also give you practical advice for writing your project summary – one of the most important parts of your application.

Find out more about the general application process for postgraduate programmes:

Department of English and Related Literature

PhD in English with Creative Writing

Join a thriving community of researchers to develop a substantial research project alongside an original piece of creative writing.

Apply for this course

Start dates

January April September ( semester dates )

UK fees International fees

Find out more about York and whether it's right for you.

Join a passionate and intellectual research community to explore literature across all periods and genres.

Your research

Our PhD in English with Creative Writing encourages distinctive approaches to practice-based literary research. This route allows you to develop a substantial research project, which incorporates an original work of creative writing (in prose, poetry, or other forms). As part of a thriving community of postgraduate researchers and writers, you'll be supported by world-leading experts with a wide range of global and historical specialisms, and given access to unique resources including our   letterpress printing studio  and   Writer in Residence.

Under the guidance of your supervisor, you will complete a critical research component of 30-40,000 words and a creative component written to its natural length (e.g. a book-length work of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction). A typical semester will involve a great deal of independent research, punctuated by meetings with your supervisor who will be able to suggest direction and address concerns throughout the writing process. You will be encouraged to undertake periods of research at archives and potentially internationally, depending on your research.

Throughout your degree, you will have the opportunity to attend a wide range of research training sessions in order to learn archival and research skills, as well as a range of research and creative seminars organised by the research schools and our distinguished Writers at York series. This brings speakers from around the world for research talks, author conversations, and networking.

Applicants for the PhD in English with Creative Writing should submit a research proposal for their overall research project, along with samples of creative and critical writing, demonstrating a suitable ability in each, as part of the application. Proposals should include plans for a critical research component of 30-40,000 words and a creative component written to its natural length (e.g, a book-length work of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction), while demonstrating a clear relationship between the two. Students embarking on a PhD programme are initially enrolled provisionally for this qualification until they pass their progression review at the end of their first full year of study. 

[email protected] +44 (0) 1904 323366

Related links

  • How to apply
  • Research degree funding
  • Accommodation
  • International students
  • Life at York

You also have the option of enrolling in a PhD in English with Creative Writing by distance learning, where you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world. You will attend the Research Training Programme online in your first year and have supervision and progression meetings online.

You must attend a five-day induction programme in York at the beginning of your first year. You will also visit York in your second and third years (every other year for part-time students).

Apply for the PhD in English with Creative Writing (distance learning)

World-leading research

We're a top ten research department according to the Times Higher Education’s ranking of the latest REF results (2021).

35th in the world

for English Language and Literature in the QS World University Rankings by Subject, 2023.

Committed to equality

We're proud to hold an Athena Swan Bronze award in recognition of the work we do to support gender equality in English.

Writers at York series

We host a series of hugely successful seminars, open to everyone, where a stellar cast of world-famous contemporary writers deliver readings and workshops.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Explore funding for postgraduate researchers in the Department of English and Related Literature.

phd creative writing glasgow university

Supervision

Explore the expertise of our staff and identify a potential supervisor.

Research student training

You'll receive training in research methods and skills appropriate to the stage you've reached and the nature of your work. In addition to regular supervisory meetings to discuss planning, researching and writing the thesis, we offer sessions on bibliographic and archival resources (digital, print and manuscript). You'll receive guidance in applying to and presenting at professional conferences, preparing and submitting material for publication and applying for jobs. We meet other training needs in handling research data, various modern languages, palaeography and bibliography. Classical and medieval Latin are also available.

We offer training in teaching skills if you wish to pursue teaching posts following your degree. This includes sessions on the delivery and content of seminars and workshops to undergraduates, a structured shadowing programme, teaching inductions and comprehensive guidance and resources for our graduate teaching assistants. Our teacher training is directed by a dedicated member of staff.

You'll also benefit from the rich array of research and training sessions at the Humanities Research Centre .

phd creative writing glasgow university

Course location

You'll be based on  Campus West , though your research may take you further afield.

We also have a distance learning option available for this course.

Entry requirements

For doctoral research, you should hold or be predicted to achieve a first-class or high upper second-class undergraduate degree with honours (or equivalent international qualification) and a Masters degree with distinction. 

The undergraduate and Masters degrees should be in literature and/or creative writing, or in a related subject that is related to the proposed research project. 

Other relevant experience and expertise may also be considered:

  • Evidence of training in research techniques may be an advantage.
  • It would be expected that postgraduate applicants would be familiar with the recent published work of their proposed supervisor.
  • Publications are not required and the Department of English and Related Literature does not expect applicants to have been published before they start their research degrees.

Supervisors interview you to ensure a good supervisory match and to help with funding applications.

The core deciding factor for admission is the quality of the research proposal, though your whole academic profile will be taken into account. We are committed to ensuring that no prospective or existing student is treated less favourably. See our  admissions policy  for more information.

Apply for the PhD in English with Creative Writing

Have a look at the supporting documents you may need for your application.

Before applying, we advise you to identify potential supervisors in the department. Preliminary enquiries are welcomed and should be made as early as possible. However, a scattershot approach – emailing all staff members regardless of the relationship between their research interests and yours – is unlikely to produce positive results. 

If it's not clear which member of staff is appropriate, you should email the   Graduate Chair .

Students embarking on a PhD programme are initially enrolled provisionally for that qualification. Confirmation of PhD registration is dependent upon the submission of a satisfactory proposal that meets the standards required for the degree, usually in the second year of study.

Find out more about how to apply .

English language requirements

You'll need to provide evidence of your proficiency in English if it's not your first language.

Check your English language requirements

Research proposal

In order to apply for a PhD, we ask that you submit a research proposal as part of your application.

When making your application, you're advised to make your research proposals as specific and clear as possible. Please indicate the member(s) of staff that you'd wish to work with

You’ll need to provide a summary of between 250 and 350 words in length of your research proposal and a longer version of around 800 words (limit of 1000). The proposal for the MA in English (by research) should be 400–500 words.

Your research proposal should:

  • Identify the precise topic of your topic and communicate the main aim of your research.
  • Provide a rigorous and thorough description of your proposed research, including the contributions you will make to current scholarly conversations and debates. Creative Writing proposals should include plans for a critical research and a creative component.
  • Describe any previous work you have done in this area, with reference to relevant literature you have read so far.
  • Communicate the central sources that the project will address and engage.
  • Offer an outline of the argument’s main claims and contributions. Give a clear indication of the authors and texts that your project will address.
  • Include the academic factors, such as university facilities, libraries resources, centres, other resources, and / or staff, which have specifically led you to apply to York.

What we look for:

  • How you place your topic in conversation with the scholarly landscape: what has been accomplished and what you plan to achieve. This is your chance to show that you have a good understanding of the relevant work on your topic and that you have identified a new way or research question to approach the topic.
  • Your voice as a scholar and critical thinker. In clean, clear prose, show those who will assess your application how your proposal demonstrates your original thinking and the potential of your research.
  • Your fit with York, including the reasons for working with your supervisor and relevant research schools and centres.
  • Above all, remember that there isn’t one uniform way to structure and arrange your research proposal, and that your approach will necessarily reflect your chosen topic.

Careers and skills

  • You'll receive support in applying to and presenting at professional conferences, preparing and submitting material for publication and applying for jobs.
  • You'll benefit from training in handling research data, various modern languages, palaeography and bibliography. Classical and medieval Latin are also available. The   Humanities Research Centre   also offers a rich array of valuable training sessions.
  • We also offer training in teaching skills if you wish to pursue a teaching post following your degree. This includes sessions on the delivery and content of seminars and workshops to undergraduates, a structured shadowing programme, teaching inductions and comprehensive guidance and resources for our graduate teaching assistants.
  • You'll have the opportunity to further your training by taking courses accredited by Advance HE:   York Learning and Teaching Award (YLTA)   and the   York Professional and Academic Development scheme (YPAD) .

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Ph.D. Creative Writing

Ph.d. in creative writing.

A rigorous program that combines creative writing and literary studies, the Ph.D. in Creative Writing prepares graduates for both scholarly and creative publication and teaching. With faculty guidance, students admitted to the Ph.D. program may tailor their programs to their goals and interests.

The creative writing faculty at KU has been widely published and anthologized, winning both critical and popular acclaim. Faculty awards include such distinctions as the Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Osborn Award, Shelley Memorial Award, Gertrude Stein Award, the Kenyon Review Prize, the Kentucky Center Gold Medallion, and the Pushcart Prize.

Regarding admission to both our doctoral and MFA creative writing programs, we will prioritize applicants who are interested in engaging with multiple faculty members to practice writing across genres and forms, from speculative fiction and realism to poetry and playwriting/screenwriting, etc.

The University of Kansas' Graduate Program in Creative Writing also offers an  M.F.A degree .

Opportunities

A GTA appointment includes a tuition waiver for ten semesters plus a competitive stipend. In the first year, GTA appointees teach English 101 (first year composition) and English 102 (a required reading and writing course). Creative Writing Ph.D. students may have the opportunity to teach an introductory course in creative writing after passing the doctoral examination, and opportunities are available for a limited number of advanced GTAs to teach in the summer.

Department Resources

  • Graduate Admissions
  • Graduate Contacts
  • Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)

Affiliated Programs

  • LandLocked Literary Magazine
  • The Project on the History of Black Writing
  • Center for the Study of Science Fiction
  • Ad-Hoc African/Americanists and Affiliates

Degree Requirements

  • At least 24 hours of credit in appropriate formal graduate courses beyond the M.A. or M.F.A. At least 15 hours (in addition to ENGL 800 if not taken for the M.A.) of this course work must be taken from among courses offered by the Department of English at the 700-level and above. English 997 and 999 credits cannot be included among the 24 hours. Students may petition to take up to 6 hours outside the Department.
  • ENGL 800: Methods, Theory, and Professionalism (counts toward the 24 required credit hours).
  • The ENGL 801/ENGL 802 pedagogy sequence (counts toward the 24 required credit hours).
  • Two seminars (courses numbered 900 or above) offered by the Department of English at the University of Kansas, beyond the M.A. or M.F.A. ENGL 998 does not fulfill this requirement.
  • ENGL 999, Dissertation (at least 12 hours).

If the M.A. or M.F.A. was completed in KU’s Department of English, a doctoral student may petition the DGS to have up to 12 hours of the coursework taken in the English Department reduced toward the Ph.D.

For Doctoral students,  the university requires completion of a course in responsible scholarship . For the English department, this would be ENGL 800, 780, or the equivalent). In addition, the Department requires reading knowledge of one approved foreign language: Old English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. Upon successful petition, a candidate may substitute reading knowledge of another language or research skill that is studied at the University or is demonstrably appropriate to the candidate’s program of study.

Doctoral students must fulfill the requirement  before  they take their doctoral examination, or be enrolled in a reading course the same semester as the exam. Students are permitted three attempts at passing each foreign language or research skill. Three methods of demonstrating reading knowledge for all approved languages except Old English are acceptable:

  • Presenting 16 hours, four semesters, or the equivalent of undergraduate credit, earned with an average of C or better.
  • Passing a graduate reading course at the University of Kansas or peer institution (e.g., French 100, German 100, etc.) with a grade of C or higher. In the past, some of these reading courses have been given by correspondence; check with the Division of Continuing Education for availability.
  • Passing a translation examination given by a designated member of the English Department faculty or by the appropriate foreign language department at KU. The exam is graded pass/fail and requires the student to translate as much as possible of a representative text in the foreign language in a one-hour period, using a bilingual dictionary.
  • Passing a translation examination given by the appropriate foreign language department at the M.A.-granting institution. Successful completion must be reflected either on the M.A. transcript or by a letter from the degree-granting department.

To fulfill the language requirement using Old English, students must successfully complete ENGL 710 (Introduction to Old English) and ENGL 712 (Beowulf).

Post-Coursework Ph.D. students must submit, with their committee chair(s), an annual review form to the DGS and Graduate Committee.

Doctoral students must take their doctoral examination within three semesters (excluding summers) of the end of the semester in which they took their final required course. If a student has an Incomplete, the timeline is not postponed until the Incomplete is resolved. For example, a student completing doctoral course work in Spring 2018 will need to schedule their doctoral exam no later than the end of Fall semester 2019. Delays may be granted by petition to the Graduate Director in highly unusual circumstances. Failure to take the exam within this time limit without an approved delay will result in the student’s falling out of good standing. For details on the consequences of falling out of good standing, see “Falling Out of Good Standing,” in General Department Policies and Best Practices.

A student may not take their doctoral exam until the university’s Research Skills and Responsible Scholarship requirement is fulfilled (ENGL 800 or equivalent and reading knowledge of one foreign language or equivalent).

Requirements for Doctoral Exams

Reading Lists: 

All students are required to submit three reading lists, based on the requirements below, to their committee for approval. The doctoral exam will be held on a date at least twelve weeks after the approval from the whole committee is received. To facilitate quick committee approval, students may copy the graduate program coordinator on the email to the committee that contains the final version of the lists. Committee members may then respond to the email in lieu of signing a printed copy. Students should work with their committee chair and graduate program coordinator to schedule the exam at the same time as they finalize the lists.

During the two-hour oral examination (plus an additional 15-30 minutes for a break and committee deliberation), a student will be tested on their comprehension of a literary period or movement, including multiple genres and groups of authors within that period or movement. In addition, the student will be tested on two of the following six areas of study:

  • An adjacent or parallel literary period or movement,
  • An author or group of related authors,
  • Criticism and literary theory,
  • Composition theory, and
  • English language.

No title from any field list may appear on either of the other two lists. See Best Practices section for more details on these six areas. See below for a description of the Review of the Dissertation Proposal (RDP), which the candidate takes the semester after passing the doctoral exam. 

While many students confer with the DGS as they begin the process of developing their lists, they are also required to submit a copy of their final exam list to the DGS. Most lists will be left intact, but the DGS might request that overly long lists be condensed, or extremely short lists be expanded.

Review of Literature

The purpose of the Review of Literature is to develop and demonstrate an advanced awareness of the critical landscape for each list. The student will write an overview of the defining attributes of the field, identifying two or three broad questions that animate scholarly discussion, while using specific noteworthy texts from their list ( but not all texts on the list ) as examples.

The review also must accomplish the following:

  • consider the historical context of major issues, debates, and trends that factor into the emergence of the field
  • offer a historical overview of scholarship in the field that connects the present to the past
  • note recent trends and emergent lines of inquiry
  • propose questions about (develop critiques of, and/or identify gaps in) the field and how they might be pursued in future study (but not actually proposing or referencing a dissertation project)

For example, for a literary period, the student might include an overview of primary formal and thematic elements, of the relationship between literary and social/historical developments, of prominent movements, (etc.), as well as of recent critical debates and topics.

For a genre list, the Review of Literature might include major theories of its constitution and significance, while outlining the evolution of these theories over time.

For a Rhetoric and Composition list, the review would give an overview of major historical developments, research, theories, methods, debates, and trends of scholarship in the field.

For an English Language Studies (ELS) list, the review would give an overview of the subfields that make up ELS, the various methodological approaches to language study, the type of sources used, and major aims and goals of ELS. The review also usually involves a focus on one subfield of particular interest to the student (such as stylistics, sociolinguistics, or World/Postcolonial Englishes).

Students are encouraged to divide reviews into smaller sections that enhance clarity and organization. Students are not expected to interact with every text on their lists.

The review of literature might be used to prepare students for identifying the most important texts in the field, along with why those texts are important to the field, for the oral exam. It is recommended for students to have completed reading the bulk of (if not all) texts on their lists before writing the ROL.

The Reviews of Literature will not be produced in an exam context, but in the manner of papers that are researched and developed in consultation with all advisors/committee members,  with final drafts being distributed within a reasonable time for all members to review and approve in advance of the 3-week deadline . While the Review of Literature generally is not the focus of the oral examination, it is frequently used as a point of departure for questions and discussion during the oral examination.

Doctoral Exam Committee

Exam committees typically consist of 3 faculty members from the department—one of whom serves as the Committee Chair—plus a Graduate Studies Representative.  University policy dictates the composition of exam committees . Students may petition for an exception for several committee member situations, with the exception of  the Graduate Studies Representative .

If a student wants to have as a committee member a person outside the university, or a person who is not in a full-time tenure-track professorship at KU, the student must contact the Graduate Secretary as early as possible. Applications for special graduate faculty status must be reviewed by the College and Graduate Studies. Requests for exam/defense approval will not be approved unless all committee members currently hold either regular or special graduate faculty status

Remote participation of committee members via technology

Students with committee members who plan to attend the defense via remote technology must be aware of  college policy on teleconferencing/remote participation of committee members .

A majority of committee members must be physically present for an examination to commence; for doctoral oral examinations this requirement is 2 of the 4 members, for master’s oral examinations the requirement is 2 of the 3 members. In addition, it is required that the student being examined, the chair of the committee, and the Graduate Studies Representative all be physically present at the examination or defense. Mediated attendance by the student, chair and Grad Studies Rep is prohibited.

The recommended time between completion of coursework and the doctoral examination is two semesters.

Final exam lists need to be approved and signed by the committee at least 12 weeks prior to the prospective exam date. This includes summers/summer semesters. The lists should then be submitted to the Graduate Program Coordinator. Reviews of Literature need to be approved and signed by the committee at least 3 weeks prior to the exam date. Failure to meet this deadline will result in rescheduling the exam. No further changes to lists or Reviews of Literature will be allowed after official approval. The three-week deadline is the faculty deadline--the last date for them to confirm receipt of the ROLs and confer approval--not necessarily the student deadline for submitting the documents to the faculty. Please keep that timing in mind and allow your committee adequate time to review the materials and provide feedback.

Students taking the Doctoral Exam are allowed to bring their text lists, the approved Reviews of Literature, scratch paper, a writing utensil, and notes/writing for an approximately 5-minute introductory statement to the exam. (This statement does not need to lay out ideas or any aspect of the dissertation project.)

Each portion of the oral examination must be deemed passing before the student can proceed to the Review of the Dissertation Proposal. If a majority of the committee judges that the student has not answered adequately on one of the three areas of the exam, the student must repeat that portion in a separate oral exam of one hour, to be taken as expeditiously as possible.  Failure in two areas constitutes failure of the exam and requires a retake of the whole.  The doctoral examining committee will render a judgment of Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory on the entire examination. A student who fails the exam twice may, upon successful petition to the Graduate Committee, take it a third and final time.

Students cannot bring snacks, drinks, treats, or gifts for committee members to the exam. Professors should avoid the appearance of favoritism that may occur if they bring treats to some student exams but not others.

The doctoral oral examination has the following purposes:

  • To establish goals, tone, and direction for the pursuit of the Ph.D. in English for the Department and for individual programs of study;
  • To make clear the kinds of knowledge and skills that, in the opinion of the Department, all well-prepared holders of the degree should have attained;
  • To provide a means for the Department to assess each candidate’s control of such knowledge and skills in order to certify that the candidate is prepared to write a significant dissertation and enter the profession; and
  • To enable the Department to recommend to the candidate areas of strength or weakness that should be addressed.

In consultation with the Graduate Director, a student will ask a member of the Department’s graduate faculty (preferably their advisor) to be the chairperson of the examining committee. The choice of examination committee chair is very important, for that person’s role is to assist the candidate in designing the examination structure, preparing the Review of Literature (see below), negotiating reading lists and clarifying their purposes, and generally following procedures here outlined. The other three English Department members of the committee will be chosen in consultation with the committee chair. (At some point an additional examiner from outside the Department, who serves as the Graduate School representative, will be invited to join the committee). Any unresolved problems in negotiation between a candidate and their committee should be brought to the attention of the Graduate Director, who may choose to involve the Graduate Committee. A student may request a substitution in, or a faculty member may ask to be dismissed from, the membership of the examining committee. Such requests must be approved, in writing, by the faculty member leaving the committee and by the Graduate Director.

Reading Lists

Copies of some approved reading lists and Reviews of Literature are available from the Graduate Secretary and can be found on the U: drive if you are using a computer on campus. Despite the goal of fairness and equity, some unavoidable unevenness and disparity will appear in the length of these lists. It remains, however, the responsibility of the examining committee, and especially the student’s chair, to aim toward consonance with the most rigorous standards and expectations and to insure that areas of study are not unduly narrow.

To facilitate quick committee approval, students may copy the graduate secretary on the email to the committee that contains the final version of the lists and reviews of literature. Committee members may then respond to the email in lieu of signing a printed copy.

Comprehension of a literary period (e.g., British literature of the 18th century; Romanticism; US literature of the 19th century; Modernism) entails sufficient intellectual grasp of both the important primary works of and secondary works on the period or movement to indicate a student’s ability to teach the period or movement and undertake respectable scholarship on it.

Comprehension of an author or group of related authors (e.g., Donne, the Brontës, the Bloomsbury Group, the Black Mountain Poets) entails knowledge, both primary and secondary, of a figure or figures whose writing has generated a significant body of interrelated biographical, historical, and critical scholarship.

Comprehension of one of several genres (the short story, the lyric poem, the epistolary novel). To demonstrate comprehension of a genre, a student should possess sufficient depth and breadth of knowledge, both primary and secondary, of the genre to explain its formal characteristics and account for its historical development.

Comprehension of criticism and literary theory entails a grasp of fundamental conceptual problems inherent in a major school of literary study (e.g., historicist, psychoanalytic, feminist, poststructuralist, etc.). To demonstrate comprehension of that school of criticism and literary theory, a student should be able to discuss changes in its conventions and standards of interpretation and evaluation of literature from its beginning to the present. Students will be expected to possess sufficient depth and breadth of theoretical knowledge to bring appropriate texts and issues to bear on questions of literary study.

Comprehension of composition theory entails an intellectual grasp of fundamental concepts, issues, and theories pertaining to the study of writing. To demonstrate comprehension of composition theory, students should be able to discuss traditional and current issues from a variety of perspectives, as well as the field’s historical development from classical rhetoric to the present.

Comprehension of the broad field of English language studies entails a grasp of the field’s theoretical concepts and current issues, as well as a familiarity with significant works within given subareas. Such subareas will normally involve formal structures (syntax, etc.) and history of the English language, along with other subareas such as social linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, etc. Areas of emphasis and specific sets of topics will be arranged through consultation with relevant faculty.

Ph.D. candidates must be continuously enrolled in Dissertation hours each Fall and Spring semester from the time they pass the doctoral examination until successful completion of the final oral examination (defense of dissertation).

  • Students enroll for a minimum of 6 hours each Fall and Spring semester until the total of post-doctoral exam Dissertation hours is 18. One hour each semester must be ENGL 999. In order to more quickly reach the 18-hour minimum, and to be sooner eligible for GRAships, it is highly recommended that students enroll in 9 hours of Dissertation in the Spring and Fall semesters. 
  • Once a student has accumulated 18 post-doctoral exam  hours, each subsequent enrollment will be for a number of hours agreed upon as appropriate between the student and their advisor, the minimal enrollment each semester being 1 hour of ENGL 999.
  • A student must be enrolled in at least one hour of credit at KU during the semester they graduate. Although doctoral students must be enrolled in ENGL 999 while working on their dissertations, per current CLAS regulations, there is no absolute minimum number of ENGL 999 hours required for graduation.
  • Students who live and work outside the Lawrence area may, under current University regulations, have their fees assessed at the Field Work rate, which is somewhat lower than the on-campus rate. Students must petition the College Office of Graduate Affairs before campus fees will be waived.

Please also refer to  the COGA policy on post-exam enrollment  or the  Graduate School’s policy .

As soon as possible following successful completion of the doctoral exam, the candidate should establish their three-person core dissertation committee, and then expeditiously proceed to the preparation of a dissertation proposal.  Within the semester following completion of the doctoral exam , the student will present to their core dissertation committee a written narrative of approximately  10-15 pages , not including bibliography, of the dissertation proposal. While the exam schedule is always contingent on student progress, in the first two weeks of the semester in which they intend to take the review , students will work with their committee chair and the graduate program coordinator to schedule the 90-minute RDP. Copies of this proposal must be submitted to the members of the dissertation committee and Graduate Program Coordinator no later than  three weeks prior  to the scheduled examination date.

In the proposal, students will be expected to define: the guiding question or set of questions; a basic thesis (or hypothesis); how the works to be studied or the creative writing produced relate to that (hypo)thesis; the theoretical/methodological model to be followed; the overall formal divisions of the dissertation; and how the study will be situated in the context of prior scholarship (i.e., its importance to the field). The narrative section should be followed by a bibliography demonstrating that the candidate is conversant with the basic theoretical and critical works pertinent to the study. For creative writing students, the proposal may serve as a draft of the critical introduction to the creative dissertation. Students are expected to consult with their projected dissertation committee concerning the preparation of the proposal.

The review will focus on the proposal, although it could also entail determining whether or not the candidate’s knowledge of the field is adequate to begin the composition process. The examination will be graded pass/fail. If it is failed, the committee will suggest areas of weakness to be addressed by the candidate, who will rewrite the proposal and retake the review  by the end of the following semester . If the candidate abandons the entire dissertation project for another, a new RDP will be taken. (For such a step to be taken, the change would need to be drastic, such as a move to a new field or topic. A change in thesis or the addition or subtraction of one or even several works to be examined would not necessitate a new proposal and defense.)  If the student fails to complete the Review of the Dissertation Proposal within a year of the completion of the doctoral exams, they will have fallen out of departmental good standing.  For details on the consequences of falling out of good standing, see “Falling Out of Good Standing,” in General Department Policies and Best Practices.

After passing the Review of the Dissertation Proposal, the student should forward one signed copy of the proposal to the Graduate Program Coordinator. The RDP may last no longer than 90 minutes.

Students cannot bring snacks, drinks, treats, or gifts for committee members to the review. Professors should avoid the appearance of favoritism that may occur if they bring treats to some student exams but not others.

The Graduate Catalog states that the doctoral candidate “must present a dissertation showing the planning, conduct and results of original research, and scholarly creativity.” While most Ph.D. candidates in the Department of English write dissertations of a traditional, research-oriented nature, a creative writing candidate may elect to do a creative-writing dissertation involving fiction, poetry, drama or nonfiction prose.  Such a dissertation must also contain a substantial section of scholarly research related to the creative writing.  The precise nature of the scholarly research component should be determined by the candidate in consultation with the dissertation committee and the Graduate Director. Candidates wishing to undertake such a dissertation must complete all Departmental requirements demanded for the research-oriented Ph.D. degree.

Scholarly Research Component (SRC)

The Scholarly Research Component (SRC) of the creative-writing dissertation is a separate section of the dissertation than the creative work. It involves substantial research and is written in the style of academic prose. It should be 15-20 pages and should cite at least 20 sources, some of which should be primary texts, and many of which should be from the peer-reviewed secondary literature. The topic must relate, in some way, to the topic, themes, ideas, or style of the creative portion of the dissertation; this relation should be stated in the Dissertation Proposal, which should include a section describing the student’s plans for the SRC. The SRC may be based on a seminar paper or other work the student has completed prior to the dissertation; but the research should be augmented, and the writing revised, per these guidelines. The SRC is a part of the dissertation, and as such will be included in the dissertation defense.

The SRC may take two general forms:

1.) An article, publishable in a peer-reviewed journal or collection, on a specific topic related to an author, movement, theoretical issue, taxonomic issue, etc. that has bearing on the creative portion. The quality of this article should be high enough that the manuscript could be submitted to a peer-reviewed publication, with a plausible chance of acceptance.

2.) A survey . This survey may take several different forms:

  • A survey of a particular aspect of the genre of the creative portion of the dissertation (stylistic, national, historical, etc.)
  • An introduction to the creative portion of the dissertation that explores the influences on, and the theoretical or philosophical foundations or implications of the creative work
  • An exploration of a particular technical problem or craft issue that is salient in the creative portion of the dissertation
  • If the creative portion of the dissertation includes the results of research (e.g., historical novel, documentary poetry, research-based creative nonfiction), a descriptive overview of the research undertaken already for the dissertation itself
  • A combination of the above, with the prior approval of the student’s dissertation director.

The dissertation committee will consist of at least four members—two “core” English faculty members, a third faculty member (usually from English), and one faculty member from a different department who serves as the Graduate Studies representative. The committee may include (with the Graduate Director’s approval) members from other departments and, with the approval of the University’s Graduate Council, members from outside the University. If a student wants to have a committee member from outside the university, or a person who is not in a full-time tenure-track professorship at KU, the student must contact the Graduate Secretary as early as possible. Applications for special graduate faculty status must be reviewed by the College and the Office of Graduate Studies. Requests for defense approval will not be approved unless all committee members currently hold either regular or special graduate faculty status.

The candidate’s preferences as to the membership of the dissertation committee will be carefully considered; the final decision, however, rests with the Department and with the Office of Graduate Studies. All dissertation committees must get approval from the Director of Graduate Studies before scheduling the final oral exam (defense). Furthermore, any changes in the make-up of the dissertation committee from the Review of the Dissertation Proposal committee must be approved by the Director of Graduate Studies.

Once the dissertation proposal has passed and the writing of the dissertation begins, membership of the dissertation committee should remain constant. However, under extraordinary circumstances, a student may request a substitution in, or a faculty member may ask to be dismissed from, the membership of the dissertation committee. Such requests must be approved, in writing, by the faculty member leaving the committee and by the Graduate Director.

If a student does not make progress during the dissertation-writing stage, and accumulates more than one “Limited Progress” and/or “No Progress” grade on their transcript, they will fall out of good standing in the department. For details on the consequences of falling out of good standing, see “Falling Out of Good Standing,” in General Department Policies and Best Practices

Final Oral Exam (Dissertation Defense)

When the dissertation has been tentatively accepted by the dissertation committee (not including the Graduate Studies Representative), the final oral examination will be held, on the recommendation of the Department. While the exam schedule is always contingent on student progress, in the first two weeks of the semester in which they intend to defend the dissertation, students should work with their committee chair and graduate program coordinator to schedule it.

Although the dissertation committee is responsible for certification of the candidate, any member of the graduate faculty may be present at the examination and participate in the questioning, and one examiner—the Graduate Studies Representative—must be from outside the Department. The Graduate Secretary can help students locate an appropriate Grad Studies Rep. The examination normally lasts no more than two hours. It is the obligation of the candidate to advise the Graduate Director that they plan to take the oral examination; this must be done at least one month before the date proposed for the examination.

At least three calendar weeks prior to the defense date, the student will submit the final draft of the dissertation to all the committee members (including the GSR) and inform the Graduate Program Coordinator. Failure to meet this deadline will necessitate rescheduling the defense.  The final oral examination for the Ph.D. in English is, essentially, a defense of the dissertation. When it is passed, the dissertation itself is graded by the dissertation director, in consultation with the student’s committee; the student’s performance in the final examination (defense) is graded by the entire five-person committee

Students cannot bring snacks, drinks, treats, or gifts for committee members to the defense. Professors should avoid the appearance of favoritism that may occur if they bring treats to some student defenses but not others

These sets of attributes are adapted from the Graduate Learner Outcomes that are a part of our Assessment portfolio. “Honors” should only be given to dissertations that are rated “Outstanding” in all or most of the following categories:

  • Significant and innovative plot/structure/idea/focus. The writer clearly places plot/structure/idea/focus in context.
  • Thorough knowledge of literary traditions. Clear/flexible vision of the creative work produced in relation to those literary traditions.
  • Introduction/Afterword is clear, concise, and insightful. A detailed discussion of the implications of the project and future writing projects exists.
  • The creative dissertation reveals the doctoral candidate’s comprehensive understanding of poetics and/or aesthetic approach. The application of the aesthetic approach is innovative and convincing.
  • The creative dissertation represents original and sophisticated creative work.
  • The creative dissertation demonstrates thematic and/or aesthetic unity.

After much discussion about whether the “honors” designation assigned after the dissertation defense should be for the written product only, for the defense/discussion only, for both together, weighted equally, or eradicated altogether, the department voted to accept the Graduate Committee recommendation that “honors” only apply to the written dissertation. "Honors" will be given to dissertations that are rated "Outstanding" in all or most of the categories on the dissertation rubric.

Normally, the dissertation will present the results of the writer’s own research, carried on under the direction of the dissertation committee. This means that the candidate should be in regular contact with all members of the committee during the dissertation research and writing process, providing multiple drafts of chapters, or sections of chapters, according to the arrangements made between the student and each faculty member. Though accepted primarily for its scholarly merit rather than for its rhetorical qualities, the dissertation must be stylistically competent. The Department has accepted the MLA Handbook as the authority in matters of style. The writer may wish to consult also  the Chicago Manual of Style  and Kate L. Turabian’s  A Manual for Writers of Dissertations, Theses, and Term Papers .

Naturally, both the student and the dissertation committee have responsibilities and obligations to each other concerning the submitting and returning of materials. The student should plan on working steadily on the dissertation; if they do so, they should expect from the dissertation committee a reasonably quick reading and assessment of material submitted.

Students preparing their dissertation should be showing chapters to their committee members as they go along, for feedback and revision suggestions. They should also meet periodically with committee members to assess their progress. Prior to scheduling a defense, the student is encouraged to ask committee members whether they feel that the student is ready to defend the dissertation. Ideally, the student should hold the defense only when they have consulted with committee members sufficiently to feel confident that they have revised the dissertation successfully to meet the expectations of all committee members.

Students should expect that they will need to revise each chapter at least once. This means that all chapters (including introduction and conclusion) are shown to committee members once, revised, then shown to committee members again in revised form to assess whether further revisions are needed, prior to the submitting of the final dissertation as a whole. It is not unusual for further revisions to be required and necessary after the second draft of a chapter; students should not therefore simply assume that a second draft is necessarily “final” and passing work.

If a substantial amount of work still needs to be completed or revised at the point that the dissertation defense is scheduled, such a defense date should be regarded as tentative, pending the successful completion, revision, and receipt of feedback on all work. Several weeks prior to the defense, students should consult closely with their dissertation director and committee members about whether the dissertation as a whole is in a final and defensible stage. A project is ready for defense when it is coherent, cohesive, well researched, engages in sophisticated analysis (in its entirety or in the critical introduction of creative dissertations), and makes a significant contribution to the field. In other words, it passes each of the categories laid out in the Dissertation Rubric.

If the dissertation has not clearly reached a final stage, the student and dissertation director are advised to reschedule the defense.

Prior Publication of the Doctoral Dissertation

Portions of the material written by the doctoral candidate may appear in article form before completion of the dissertation. Prior publication does not ensure the acceptance of the dissertation by the dissertation committee. Final acceptance of the dissertation is subject to the approval of the dissertation committee. Previously published material by other authors included in the dissertation must be properly documented.

Each student beyond the master’s degree should confer regularly with the Graduate Director regarding their progress toward the doctoral examination and the doctorate.

Doctoral students may take graduate courses outside the English Department if, in their opinion and that of the Graduate Director, acting on behalf of the Graduate Committee, those courses will be of value to them. Their taking such courses will not, of course, absolve them of the responsibility for meeting all the normal departmental and Graduate School requirements.

Doctoral students in creative writing are strongly encouraged to take formal literature classes in addition to forms classes. Formal literature classes, by providing training in literary analysis, theory, and/or literary history, will help to prepare students for doctoral exams (and future teaching at the college level).

FALL SEMESTER            

  • GTAs take 2 courses (801 + one), teach 2 courses; GRAs take 3 courses.
  • Visit assigned advisor once a month to update on progress & perceptions. 1st-year advisors can assist with selecting classes for the Spring semester, solidifying and articulating a field of specialization, advice about publishing, conferences, professionalization issues, etc.

SPRING SEMESTER

  • GTAs take 2 courses (780/800/880 + one), teach 2 courses. GTAs also take ENGL 802 for 1 credit hour. GRAs take 3 courses.
  • Visit assigned advisor or DGS once during the semester; discuss best advisor choices for Year 2.

SUMMER SEMESTER

  • Enroll in Summer Institute if topic and/or methodology matches interests.
  • Consider conferences suited to your field and schedule; choose a local one for attendance in Year 2 and draft an Abstract for a conference paper (preferably with ideas/materials/ writing drawn from a seminar paper).  Even if abstract is not accepted, you can attend the conference without the pressure of presenting.
  • Attend at least one conference to familiarize yourself with procedure, network with other grad students and scholars in your field, AND/OR present a paper.

FALL SEMESTER

  • Take 2 courses, teach 2 courses.
  • Visit advisor in person at least once during the semester.

WINTER BREAK

  • Begin revising one of your seminar papers/independent study projects/creative pieces for submission to a journal; research the journals most suited to placement of your piece.
  • Begin thinking about fields and texts for comprehensive examinations.
  • Choose an advisor to supervise you through the doctoral examination process.
  • Visit assigned 1st-year advisor in person at least once during the semester (at least to formally request doctoral exam supervision OR to notify that you are changing advisors).
  • Summer teaching, if eligible.
  • Continue revising paper/creative writing for submission to a journal.
  • Begin reading for comprehensive exams.
  • Attend one conference and present a paper. Apply for one-time funding for out-of-state travel  from Graduate Studies .
  • Teach 2 courses; take 997 (exam prep).
  • Finalize comps list by end of September; begin drafting rationales.
  • Circulate the draft of your article/creative piece to your advisor, other faculty in the field, and/or advanced grad students in the field for suggestions.
  • Revise article/creative piece with feedback from readers.
  • Teach 2 courses; take 997 or 999 (dissertation hours). Enroll in 999 if you plan to take your comps this semester, even if you don’t take them until the last day of classes.
  • Take comps sometime between January and May.
  • Summer teaching, if available.
  • Submit article/creative work for publication.
  • Continuous enrollment after completing doctoral exam (full policy on p. 20)
  • Research deadlines for grant applications—note deadlines come early in the year.
  • Attend one conference and present a paper.
  • Teach 2 courses, take 999.
  • Compose dissertation proposal by November.
  • Schedule Review of Dissertation Proposal (RDP—formerly DPR).
  • Apply for at least one grant or fellowship, such as a departmental-level GRAship or dissertation fellowship. (Winning a full-year, non-teaching fellowship can cut down your years-to-degree to 5 ½, or even 5 years.)
  • Conduct research for and draft at least 1 dissertation chapter.
  • Conduct research and complete a draft of at least 1 dissertation chapter.
  • Revise & resubmit journal article, if necessary.
  • Attend 1st round of job market meetings with Job Placement Advisor (JPA) to start drafting materials and thinking about the process.
  • Research and complete a draft of at least 1 dissertation chapter, if teaching (1-2 chapters if not).
  • Visit dissertation chair  and  committee members in person at least once during the semester.
  • Research and complete a draft of at least 1 dissertation chapter (1-2 chapters if not teaching).
  • Apply for a departmental grant or fellowship, or, if already held, try applying for one from outside the department, such as those offered by KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities or the Office of Graduate Studies. For  a monthly list of funding opportunities , visit the Graduate Studies website.
  • Research and complete a draft of at least 1 dissertation chapter.
  • Attend job market meetings with JPA in earnest.
  • Apply for external grants, research fellowships, postdoctoral positions with fall deadlines (previous fellowship applications, your dissertation proposal, and subsequent writing should provide a frame so that much of the application can be filled out with the “cut & paste” function).
  • Research and complete a draft of at least 1 dissertation chapter (1-2 if not teaching).
  • Visit dissertation chair and committee members in person at least once during the semester.
  • Polish dissertation chapters.
  • Apply for grants and fellowships with spring deadlines.
  • Defend dissertation.

Creative Writing Faculty

Darren Canady

  • Associate Professor

Megan Kaminski

  • Professor of English & Environmental Studies

Laura Moriarty

  • Assistant Professor

Graduate Student Handbook

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  • Postgraduate study
  • Taught degree programmes A‑Z
  • Creative Writing (online distance learning)

Postgraduate taught  

Creative Writing (online) MLitt: Online distance learning

Two students with laptops having a conversation

Note: This programme is also delivered on campus. To find out more about this programme or the research opportunities available, visit our Creative Writing subject page

If you're a talented and ambitious writer looking to develop your craft and take your writing to the next level, Glasgow's renowned Creative Writing MLitt is ideal. Develop your writing practice wherever you are in the world by gaining creative and critical skills on this exciting and supportive online course.

  • Online distance learning
  • Academic contact: Dr Colin Herd  [email protected]
  • Teaching start: September
  • MLitt: 12 months full-time; 24 months part‑time

Register your interest for more information

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Why this programme

  • Our MLitt in Creative Writing is delivered within a clear three-part structure, focused on creative, critical and editorial skills.
  • Our Creative Writing programme has gained an excellent reputation with writers, agents and publishers. The University's writing courses are among the most challenging and popular in the UK.
  • These courses have helped launch the careers of an impressive list of acclaimed authors including, but not limited to: Anne Donovan, Helen Sedgwick, Kirsty Logan, Jen Hadfield, JL Williams, Louise Welsh, Zoe Strachan, Elizabeth Reeder and many others.
  • You'll be taught by successful and well-regarded writers who specialise across diverse genres. We are happy to supervise students working in established genres but just as keen to see students mix genres or create new forms. In addition, you'll be able to tap into the University's strong network of literary agents and publishers, as well as an impressive list of published alumni. 
  • This online programme is 1 year full time. If you are already working full time or have family commitments, the course can also be completed on a part-time flexible study basis over 2 years.
  • Listen to our podcast: Stories from Glasgow – Writing Space with Dr Oliver K. Langmead .
  • Read From Glasgow to Saturn, our literary journal .

Programme structure

The full-time programme consists of the following courses. The part-time programme consists of the same courses split over two years.

  • CREATIVE WRITING: CRAFT AND EXPERIMENTATION 1 (DL)
  • CREATIVE WRITING: EDITING AND PUBLICATION 1 (DL)
  • CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP (DLEARNING)
  • CREATIVE WRITING: CRAFT AND EXPERIMENTATION 2 (DL)   Option 1
  • READING & WRITING DEATH & DYING DL   Option 2
  • CREATIVE WRITING: EDITING AND PUBLICATION 2 (DL)

Summer Semester

  • CREATIVE WRITING PORTFOLIO (PGT) (DLEARNING)

Programme outcomes

  • Experiment with a range of voices, techniques and genres and consider major creative and editorial engagements
  • Develop a critical understanding of a diverse creative, theoretic and critical texts
  • Develop editorial skills
  • Gain an understanding of literary techniques and ideas
  • Access the work and thought of a wide range of literary artists
  • Produce extended portfolios of creative and editorial work
  • Understand the writing context (audience, publishing in all its forms, the legal framework, modes of transmission)
  • Become disciplined in writing regularly in a stimulating workshop and tutorial environment in which writing skills can be acquired, discussed and honed
  • Be part of a stimulating and critical peer group that reads, engages with, and appraises one others work
  • Understand the means of literary transmission and how these means affect your own work
  • Meet, hear and talk to professional writers and individuals from publishing and other transmission industries
  • Display an understanding of the mechanisms (historical and contemporary) of literary textual transmission and other forms of transmission (including performance) in their various technological, commercial and artistic aspects

"I can honestly say that the programme was the best thing that has ever happened for my writing." Nichola Deadman, Creative Writing student

Programme alteration or discontinuation The University of Glasgow endeavours to run all programmes as advertised. In exceptional circumstances, however, the University may withdraw or alter a programme. For more information, please see: Student contract .

Career prospects

Skills gained in the study of our Creative Writing MLitt may lead to career opportunities in literary and cultural fields such as editing, publishing and arts development. Many of our alumni are successful authors. Our graduates have also gone into journalism, publishing, and a range of other professions. Positions held by recent graduates include managing director, freelance writer, author, copywriter and community arts worker.

Fees & funding

Tuition fees for 2024-25

  • Full-time fee: £10650
  • Part-time fee: £1184 per 20 credits

International & EU

  • Full-time fee: £22140

Part-time fees:

  • UK :  £1,184 per 20 credits (180 credits in total)
  • International & EU : £2,460 per 20 credits (180 credits in total)

The credits are split: 

  • Year 1 : 80 credits (4 x £1,184 / £2,460) for Craft & Experimentation 1 and 2, and Workshops
  • Year 2 : 100 credits (5 x £1,184 / £2,460) for Editing & Publication 1 and 2, and Portfolio

Additional fees

  • Fee for re-assessment of a dissertation (PGT programme): £370
  • Submission of thesis after deadline lapsed: £350
  • Registration/exam only fee: £170

Funding opportunities

  • UK Study Online Scholarship

The UK Study Online scholarship is open to UK, EU and international students taking online undergraduate and postgraduate courses. 

Please see  UK Study Online for more details.

  • Postgraduate Student Loan (Scotland and EU)

Eligible full-time and part-time students, undertaking an eligible postgraduate course, can apply for a tuition fee loan up to a maximum of £7,000 towards their course. Eligible full-time postgraduate students can apply for a living-cost loan of up to £4,500.  

This support extends to online Masters or Postgraduate Diplomas, and not to the online Postgraduate Certificate courses.

For more information visit the SAAS website .

  • Postgraduate Tuition Fee Loans England only (PTFL)

If you’re an English student looking to study a taught Masters programme in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan. Students from England are able to apply for a non-means tested   Postgraduate Master’s Loan  of up to £11,570   to help with course fees and living costs. You have to  repay your Postgraduate Master’s Loan  at the same time as any other student loans you have. You’ll be charged interest from the day you get the first payment.

If you’re studying by distance learning, you can also apply.

  • Postgraduate Loans for Welsh Students

If you are a Welsh student looking to study a postgraduate programme* in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan in exactly the same way as you would for a Welsh University.

* does not apply to Erasmus Mundus programmes

Postgraduate Master's Finance

If you’re starting a full-time or part-time Postgraduate Master’s course (taught or research based) from 1 August 2019, you can apply for Postgraduate Master's Finance and receive up to £17,000 as a combination of grant and loan:

  • a maximum grant of £6,885 and loan of £10,115 if your household income is £18,370 and below
  • a grant of £1,000 and loan of £16,000 if your household income is not taken into account or is above £59,200.

For more information visit  Student Finance Wales

Postgraduate Doctoral Loan

If you’re starting a full-time or part-time postgraduate Doctoral course (such as a PhD) from 1 August 2019 you can apply for a Postgraduate Doctoral Loan of up to £25,700.

  • Alumni Discount

In response to the current unprecedented economic climate, the University is offering a 20% discount on all Postgraduate Research and full Postgraduate Taught Masters programmes to its alumni, commencing study in Academic session 2024/25. This includes University of Glasgow graduates and those who have completed a Study Abroad programme, International Summer School programme or the Erasmus Programme at the University of Glasgow. The discount applies to all full-time, part-time and online programmes. This discount can be awarded alongside most University scholarships.

  • Postgraduate Student Loan (NI)

If you are a Northern Irish student looking to study a taught Masters programme* in Glasgow then you can apply for a student loan in exactly the same way as you would for a University in Northern Ireland.

Northern Irish students are able to apply for non-means-tested tuition fee loans of up to £5,500, to help with the costs of funding.

For more information visit  www.studentfinanceni.co.uk/types-of-finance/postgraduate  .

The scholarships above are specific to this programme. For more funding opportunities search the scholarships database

Entry requirements

  • You will normally have a 2:1 Honours degree (or equivalent), though this is not a pre-requisite.
  • The primary basis for admission is the appraisal of a portfolio of your creative work.
  • You submit a portfolio of original work (poetry, fiction, life-writing or other prose, drama, and in some instances a portfolio of translation work). A maximum of 20 pages (one side only, double spaced throughout) per submission will be considered, and the portfolio can contain prose, verse, script, or a combination of these.
  • We also require two letters of reference. Your referees should include an academic and a creative referee where possible. Where this is not possible, you can provide referees from other areas who can vouch that you are who you say you are and that your work and achievements are your own. It is particularly helpful if these referees are familiar with your writing and can provide references on that basis.

English language requirements

For applicants whose first language is not English, the University sets a minimum English Language proficiency level.

International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic module (not General Training)

  • 7.0 with no subtests under 7.0
  • Tests must have been taken within 2 years 5 months of start date. Applicants must meet the overall and subtest requirements using a single test.

Common equivalent English language qualifications

Toefl (ibt, my best or athome).

  • 94; with Reading 24; Listening 24; Speaking 23; Writing 27
  • Tests must have been taken within 2 years 5 months of start date. Applicants must meet the overall and subtest requirements , this includes TOEFL mybest.

Pearsons PTE Academic

  • 66 with no subtest less than: Listening 66;Reading 68; Speaking 65; Writing 82

Cambridge Proficiency in English (CPE) and Cambridge Advanced English (CAE)

  • 185 overall, no subtest less than 185

Oxford English Test

  • Oxford ELLT 8
  • R&L: OIDI level no less than 8 with Reading: 27-28 and Listening: 20
  • W&S: OIDI level no less than 8.

Trinity College Tests

Integrated Skills in English II & III & IV: ISEII Pass with Pass in all sub-tests.

University of Glasgow Pre-sessional courses

Tests are accepted for 2 years following date of successful completion.

Alternatives to English Language qualification

  • students must have studied for a minimum of 2 years at Undergraduate level, or 9 months at Master's level, and must have complete their degree in that majority-English speaking country and within the last 6 years
  • students must have completed their final two years study in that majority-English speaking country and within the last 6 years

For international students, the Home Office has confirmed that the University can choose to use these tests to make its own assessment of English language ability for visa applications to degree level programmes. The University is also able to accept UKVI approved Secure English Language Tests (SELT) but we do not require a specific UKVI SELT for degree level programmes. We therefore still accept any of the English tests listed for admission to this programme.

For further information about English language requirements, please contact the Recruitment and International Office using our  enquiry form

How to apply

To apply for a postgraduate taught degree you must apply online. We cannot accept applications any other way.

Please check you meet the Entry requirements for this programme before you begin your application.

As part of your online application, you also need to submit the following supporting documents:

  • A copy (or copies) of your official degree certificate(s) (if you have already completed your degree)
  • A copy (or copies) of your official academic transcript(s), showing full details of subjects studied and grades/marks obtained
  • Official English translations of the certificate(s) and transcript(s)
  • One reference letter on headed paper
  • Evidence of your English language ability (if your first language is not English)
  • Any additional documents required for this programme (see Entry requirements for this programme)
  • A copy of the photo page of your passport (Non-EU students only)

You have 42 days to submit your application once you begin the process.

You may save and return to your application as many times as you wish to update information, complete sections or upload supporting documents such as your final transcript or your language test.

For more information about submitting documents or other topics related to applying to a postgraduate taught programme, see  how to apply for a postgraduate taught degree

Guidance notes for using the online application

These notes are intended to help you complete the online application form accurately; they are also available within the help section of the online application form. 

If you experience any difficulties accessing the online application, see  Application System Help .

  • Name and Date of birth:  must appear exactly as they do on your passport. Please take time to check the spelling and lay-out.
  • Contact Details : Correspondence address. All contact relevant to your application will be sent to this address including the offer letter(s). If your address changes, please contact us as soon as possible.
  • Choice of course : Please select carefully the course you want to study. As your application will be sent to the admissions committee for each course you select it is important to consider at this stage why you are interested in the course and that it is reflected in your application.
  • Proposed date of entry:  Please state your preferred start date including the month and the year. Taught masters degrees tend to begin in September. Research degrees may start in any month.
  • Education and Qualifications : Please complete this section as fully as possible indicating any relevant Higher Education qualifications starting with the most recent. Complete the name of the Institution (s) as it appears on the degree certificate or transcript.
  • English Language Proficiency : Please state the date of any English language test taken (or to be taken) and the award date (or expected award date if known).
  • Employment and Experience : Please complete this section as fully as possible with all employments relevant to your course. Additional details may be attached in your personal statement/proposal where appropriate.

Reference : Please provide one reference. This should typically be an academic reference but in cases where this is not possible then a reference from a current employer may be accepted instead. Certain programmes, such as the MBA programme, may also accept an employer reference. If you already have a copy of a reference on letter headed paper then please upload this to your application. If you do not already have a reference to upload then please enter your referee’s name and contact details on the online application and we will contact your referee directly.

Application deadlines

September 2024, all applicants.

As there is extremely high demand for places on this degree programme, the University has established an application process with application rounds. This process aims to ensure fairness and equity to applicants and should support applications being open for the full admission cycle.

Round 1 application dates

1 October 2023 to 19 November 2023 . You will receive our decision on your application by 3 February 2024 .

Round 2 application dates

20 November 2023 . You will receive our decision on your application by 24 March 2024 .

Round 3 application dates

19 February 2024 . You will receive our decision on your application by 8 July 2024.

Round 4 application dates (if applicable)  

28 May 2024 . You will receive our decision on your application by 11 August 2024 .  

As we receive a great number of applications, prospective students are only allowed to apply once per year.

More information about this programme

  • Core and optional courses
  • Creative Writing at Glasgow

Related programmes

Creative writing.

  • Creative Writing [MLitt]

English Literature

  • English Literature [MLitt]
  • English Literature: American Modern Literature [MLitt]
  • English Literature: Fantasy [MLitt]

more related English Literature programmes

Related links

  • About postgraduate study
  • How to apply for a postgraduate taught degree
  • Postgraduate research opportunities A-Z
  • How to apply for a postgraduate research degree
  • Fees and funding

phd creative writing glasgow university

Postgraduate events

Open Days, information sessions, campus tours, events near you

phd creative writing glasgow university

Postgraduate prospectus

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