Aisha Rahman Asha is a PhD student at English Department, Dalhousie University, Canada. She is also a faculty member at English Discipline, Khulna University, Bangladesh with a modest five-year teaching career and is currently on study leave. Her true specialty is South Asian literature but she also teaches Literary Theory, Victorian poetry, and Twentieth Century English Drama.

Aiden Tait (they/he) is a SSHRC-funded PhD student specialising in American literature and pop culture. Their dissertation, "'I'm chasing shadows': The Eldritch Detective in New Weird Fiction," investigates subjectivity and monstrosity in New Weird detective fiction. He has previously published and presented work on New Weird media, with a focus on the role of cosmic horror in contemporary animation. Tait is also a published small-batch poet and currently works as a technical writer.

Brandon Hachey (he/him) is a Master’s student studying the environmental humanities as well as speculative and climate fiction. Increasingly, he is curious about how the environmental humanities intersect with the study of urban spaces. His Master’s thesis investigates the potential for the rhetorical affects of dark humour to serve as a generative avenue for considering the perceived hopelessness of climate change. Much of his research also pivots around the subgenre of science fantasy and the motif of representing technology as magic. In his free time, Brandon is a geography enthusiast.

Ella Ratz (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the field of Canadian Literature. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation project investigates the ways in which urban space is imagined within 21st-century feminist poetry in English Canada. Ella comes to Dalhousie with a BA from the University of New Brunswick and an English & Cultural Studies MA from McMaster University. 

Emily (she/her) is a PhD student interested in intersections of medicine and literature. Her Killam-funded doctoral research will focus on representations of various modes of recovery in contemporary fiction and memoir. Originally from Epekwitk/PEI, Emily comes to Dal via an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC (2022), an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University (2019), and an MA in English from the University of Guelph (2018). She completed her BA in English & Biology at Acadia in 2017. 

Emily's poetry and fiction have appeared in various publications, including FreeFall, yolk, and carte-blanche. Her creative nonfiction was long-listed for The New Quarterly's 2023 Edna Staebler personal essay contest. She also serves as the Poetry Reviews Editor for the Artisanal Writer. Emily lives with her partner, Simon, and her cat, Chloe—both of whom try to be supportive of how much time she spends at her desk. 

Gavin Foster (he/him) is a Killam and SSHRC funded PhD candidate studying medieval literature. His research interests include Old and Middle English translation/adaptation, Tolkien, and queer theory.  His dissertation aims to trace trajectories of grief through the experiences of female characters in Old English elegiac poetry, Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He has presented work at many conferences including the International Medieval Congress (IMC) and the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) and has been published in the Journal of Tolkien Research, with multiple publications forthcoming. He writes poetry on the side (the perpetual task of the English student). 

Helen Pinsent is a PhD candidate at Dalhousie, focusing on American gothic literature and popular culture with the support of a Killam Doctoral Award and a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include monster studies and mobility studies, and she is especially fascinated by the many ways the two fields overlap. She has recently presented work on Jack Kerouac, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Lovecraft Country, and her dissertation is tentatively titled “Automonstrosity: Automobility and the American Dream in Post-War American Gothic.”

Krista Collier-Jarvis (Mi’kmaw; nekm/she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Dalhousie as well as an Assistant Professor in English at MSVU. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research looks at zombie narratives and puts forth an Indigenous-informed, multispecies approach to contagion and climate change. She has recently published an article on uncanny play in Pet Sematary and has a forthcoming chapter on Blood Quantum in a collection about Indigenous and Aboriginal Gothic. In addition to these topics, she has presented papers on The Last of Us, The Marrow Thieves, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Mad Max: Fury Road, Indigenous representation in museums, and intergenerational trauma, just to name a few. She is an Affiliate for Thinking through the Museum and works as a consultant on Indigenous collections at various museums. She has just been awarded a grant to study Arctic Gothic in Iqaluit as well as a SGSAH Earth Scholarship and will be spending time at Edinburgh Napier University in 2024 researching littoral mapping and Scottish Gothic.

Lindsay Church (She/Her) is a SSHRC-funded, Special Provost Alumni PhD candidate studying medieval literature. Her PhD project explores the way that modern fantasy adaptations of the Arthurian mythos ‘write back’ to idea of who gets to be legendary in medieval Arthuriana (particularly Malory’s Morte Darthur). Alongside King Arthur, medieval literature more broadly, and fantasy literature, her research interests include representations of girlhood, the apocalypse, and monsters. She has presented at numerous conferences and has published in Americana (forthcoming). In her spare time, she writes fantasy fiction and bothers her cat.  

Michael Cameron studies “extinction narratives” of all sorts – apocalypse and apocalyptic literature (both secular and biblical); human extinction in science fiction; nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, particularly its emphasis on species extinction and its influence on Romanticism and Victorian literature; and depictions of endangered species and species extinction in popular science. His doctoral project, tentatively titled “The Last (Hu)Man from the Age of Revolution to the End of History,” explores the figure of the “Last Man” in literature and political theory from three interpretive axes: Last Man qua “endling” or the solitary final member of the human species; Last Man qua “New Adam” or the last fertile human male charged with the procreative task of restarting the human race; and Last Man qua Nietzschean “old age of mankind” or human civilization on the decline. Cameron has been awarded two Joseph Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate Scholarships, one Master’s and one Doctoral. His work has been published in Romanticism, and his first monograph, The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy, was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2024.  "

Shannon Payne is a Killam and SSHRC funded scholar. Her MA thesis focused on ecocritical readings of Guillermo del Toro films (specifically Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, and The Shape of Water). Building on that work, her PhD dissertation, titled “It’s Not Game Over,” examines the unique capabilities of video games to respond to the climate crisis. Shannon has presented work at the IGA, and as part of the Green College Resident Members’ Series at the University of British Columbia. In addition to her academic work, Shannon has published several pieces of short fiction and she likes to unwind by running Dungeons and Dragons games for her friends.

Sharon Vogel Kubik is a PhD Candidate studying representations of witchcraft in Early Modern Drama under the supervision of Dr. Christina Luckyj and Dr. Andrew Brown. She completed her BA at King's University College, Western, and her MA at Western University.  A sample of her SSHRC-funded research,  "'Heaven guide him to thy husband’s cudgel': Falstaff as Male Witch in The Merry Wives of Windsor," appears in 26.2 of Early Theatre. Sharon has taught several courses at Dalhousie, including Early Modern Theatre, Literature: How it Works, and Literature: A Global Perspective. She also works as a senior writing tutor at Dalhousie's writing centre. 

Zoe's current research interests focus on fields of literature and visual art, specifically poetry and collage in the 20th century modernist period. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research will examine the relationship between what she posit to be modernist poet-collage artist duos who, while one is more involved in the writing of poetry and the other in the creation of collage, maintain longstanding and intimate relationships wherein the poet’s art and the collagist’s art converge, coalesce, and ultimately inform each artists’ respective practice and output, be it literary or visual. A second point of interest in her research will be individual poets well-established in poetry and poetic discourse, and who also spend a significant portion of their artistic careers practicing collage. 

Zoe's research focuses primarily on artists from the transatlantic modernist period, addressing the ways in which poetry and collage engage with, borrow from, and ultimately converge with one another, despite contemporary beliefs that they belong to separate media.

Zoe received a BA with majors in Western Society & Culture and Creative Writing and an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University. While pursuing her studies at Dalhousie University, she continued her literary and visual arts practices, focusing on experimental prose fiction, poetry, and collage.