Organisers
Dr. Tracy Fahey is Head of Department of Fine Art and Head of Centre of Postgraduate Studies in Limerick School of Art and Design (LSAD). In 2013 she established the LSAD research centre ACADEMY where she also acts as principal investigator. Her primary research area is the Gothic, with special reference to the visual arts. She is currently working on a monograph, Contemporary Irish Folk Gothic for University of Wales Press. She has also published on domestic Gothic, Gothic bodies and medical Gothic, contemporary Gothic art, transgressive body-based art and a/r/tography. In 2010 she founded the art collaborative, Gothicise, who create site-specific socially engaged projects. Her short fiction has been published in fourteen anthologies, and her collection The Unheimlich Manoeuvre was published in July 2016. In 2016, two of her short stories were long-listed for Honourable Mentions in The Year’s Best Horror (ed. Ellen Datlow).
Dr. Maria Beville teaches English literatures at the University of Limerick and is a visiting Research Fellow at ACADEMY, Limerick School of Art and Design. Her research specialisms include Gothic Studies, Urban Literature, Criticial Theory (in particular, Postmodernism) and Irish Studies. She has published widely across these areas and recent books include 'The Gothic and the Everyday: Living Gothic' (Palgrave 2014) and 'The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film' (Routledge 2013). She is co-director for The Centre for Otherness www.otherness.dk and serves as general editor for the online peer reviewed journal, 'Otherness: Essays and Studies'
Dr Karl Bell is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth. His research explores aspects of the fantastical imagination from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Much of his work examines the relationship between supernatural folklore, magical beliefs, modernity and urban environments. He is the author of The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914 (2012), and the award-winning The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Culture (2012). More recently he has co-edited two books, Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, 1700-2000 (2016), and a short story collection, Dark City: Portsmouth Tales of Haunting and Horror (2016). He is the director of Supernatural Cities, an interdisciplinary research project and network based at the University of Portsmouth (www.port.ac.uk/supernaturalcities/). He is also the lead organiser for Portsmouth DarkFest, a festival that celebrates local creativity and the arts, the supernatural and the macabre.
Dr. Deirdre Flynn is a Teaching Fellow in Modern Drama in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She has worked at the Moore Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She has lectured at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level in English Literature, and Drama and Theatre Studies. She worked professionally as a journalist for a number of years and is the Network Chair of Sibeal, the postgraduate and Early Career Network for Feminist and Gender Studies.