There are some fantastic events coming up – all our favourite themes! – but first we’d like to thank everyone again who participated in the Sea Changes conference and helped make it such a fabulous event. We have reviews and pictures of the event on our Scenes from Sea Changes page here. We also have the results and entries of our Mermaid Flash Fiction competition; these are all richly inventive and imaginative and it was hard to choose a winner.
Troubling Wonder – Online Symposium on Fairy-Tale Studies
1 October 2025 3:00–4 October 2025 7:30 PM BST; on line
There is still time to catch the last two days of this exciting event–we apologise for leaving it so late to post.
Join us for four days of fresh perspectives and inspiring research into the world of fairy tales. The programme features panels on a wide range of topics, along with these special sessions:
✨ Book Presentation: Justice in 21st-Century Fairy Tales and the Power of Wonder (2025), with Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa) and Pauline Greenhill (University of Winnipeg)
✨ Special Issue Presentation: “Norm and Transgression in the Fairy-Tale Tradition” (2025), Marvels & Tales, with Alessandro Cabiati (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Lewis Seifert (Brown University)
✨ Lecture: Creative and Critical Approaches to Fairy Tales and Disability Studies, with Beth O’Brien (University of Birmingham), founder of Disabled Tales and author of Wolf Siren (2025)
Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook on folklore
7 October 2025, 6:30–7:30 pm BST; on line
Join leading folklore experts Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook as they present their groundbreaking book Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present, the definitive guide to British folklore that travels from village rituals and fairy tales to UFO legends and internet fanfiction.
Travelling through a landscape of witches, wizards and wicker men, Owen and Ceri will reveal how folklore has been researched and written about in the past and show how it continues to be lived in the present. They will explore folklore in all its remarkable variations, providing readers with a valuable toolkit for understanding how to interpret the diverse examples given.
Folklore: Ceri Houlbrook and Tabitha Stanmore in Conversation
9 October 2025, 6:30 pm; The Lounge, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
More from Ceri Houlbrook:
Author Ceri Holbrook appears in conversation about her new book, co-written by Owen Davies, Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present. Ceri will be joined by Tabitha Stanmore, author of CUNNING FOLK: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. The authors will be in conversation with Mel Giles, Professor in European Prehistory at the University of Manchester.
Fee Greening in conversation: Katharine Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies
7 October 2025; 7–8:30pm GMT+1; on line
The Folkore Society
Artist Fee Greening, inspired by Gothic fairytale and medieval illumination, illustrates a new edition of Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies.
Gothic fiction & The Female Writer
6 November 2025; 6:30–8:45pm GMT; Friends’ Meeting House, 6 Mount Street, Manchester, M2 5NS
Seed Talks
How have horror and ghost stories challenged gender norms? Explore the feminist side of Gothic fiction. With Q&A.
From a Cornfield to the Gothic: An Appreciation of the Scarecrow
21 November 2025, 7–8:30pm GMT+1; on line
The Folkore Society
Juliette Wood looks appreciatively at the history and traditions of scarecrows
Dracula Lunchtime Bites 2: Queering the Slayer: from Dracula to Buffy
15 October 2025, 12:30 PM–1:00 PM; on line
The Derby Dracula
Marginalised and misunderstood, the vampire is usually more so associated with queerness than its counterpart the slayer. In this talk, Claire Mead explores what’s at stake in a queered interpretation of the slayer from the original Dracula to modern depictions, to understand how this at first sight archetypical hero subverts our assumptions.
CFP: Fantasy’s Present Pasts: The inaugural European Conference on the Fantastic
23–25 June 2026, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
Deadline: 12 December 2025
The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is delighted to invite proposals for ‘Fantasy’s Present Pasts’. This will be the first in a series of annual European Conferences on the Fantastic organised by groups of scholars across the continent, currently invhostory historical fictionolving clusters in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and the UK.
‘Fantasy’s Present Pasts’ invites innovative papers that explore works of Fantasy or consider genre culture more broadly. However, it focuses particularly on the ways in which speculative genres engage with the interplay of past and present. It hopes to explore the kinds of history on which works of Fantasy currently draw; the ways in which pasts present themselves in genre texts; and the manners in which we currently model the diverse pasts of genres across different cultures and traditions. As the inaugural conference in a new series, it hopes to take stock of where we are in genre studies and collaboratively to think through where we would like to get to.
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