
* Conference Room 1 is the main room where all the Plenaries and other activities take place. You can leave this room to join a Panel in Room 2, then return when that has finished.
* Each paper is numbered so that you can match it with the List of Abstracts here.
Click on the blue Panel titles to expand and see the papers.
Thursday, 8 April 2021
1: 9:45 – 10:00 Welcome
Dr Sam George University of Hertfordshire
2: 10:00 – 10:40 Plenary: Where do fairies come from? Shifts in shape
Prof. Diane Purkiss Keble College, Oxford
Introduced by Daisy Butcher
3: 10:40 – 11:25 Parallel Session:
Precious commodities: Children, fairy-folk, and the cult of death in the nineteenth century
22 Katerina García-Walsh (University of St Andrews)
Glimmers of fairy sight in Margaret Oliphant’s Scottish Gothic
56 Madelaine Sacco (University of Newcastle, NSW)
Keys to the doorways to the fairy realm: Travelling to Fairy in modern literature
‘Twilight Creatures’: Dark fae and fire spirits in Young Adult Gothic and fantasy
41 Helen Nde (Mythological Africans)
The Gothic in traditional African folklore: Tales of wonder, horror and the Otherfolk
65 David Williams (Fireside Canada)
Trigger-happy fairies vs. real estate witches: The unseen indigenous in ‘The Baldoon Mystery’ and other settler Gothic tales
4: 11:25 – 11:45 Tea/Coffee Break
5: 11:45 – 12:30 Parallel Session:
Between the lights: A self-reflective Christmas among the fairies
37 Dr Jane Mainley Piddock (Aberystwyth University
Was M. R. James away with the fairies?
54 Jack Rooney (Ohio State University)
Ever the thought of her abides with me': Rosamund Marriott Watson and the fairy poetics of the hidden soul
Russian Gothic faeries as harbingers of twenty-first-century ecognosis
20 Dr Kaja Franck (University of Hertfordshire)
‘No weapon forged by mortal or fey can harm the Iron King’: Imagining the environmental apocalypse in Julia Kagawa’s Iron Fey series
58 Cat Smith (Nottingham Trent University)
Gods, men, and monsters: Eco warnings in In The Night Wood * Cancelled owing to illness
6: 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
7: 13:30 – 14:10 Plenary: Precious revisions of greedy glass bottle tricks: Nalo Hopkinson’s folkloric revisions of classic fairytales and myths
Dr Maisha Wester Indiana University
Introduced by Bill Hughes
8: 14:10 – 14:30 Tea/Coffee Break
9: 14:30 – 15:15 Parallel Session:
Beware perfection unremarked: Fairy enchantment and human art in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and Kat Howard’s Roses and Rot
4 Fabio Bazzano (University of Pavia)
Gothic fairies and other magical forces of good in early English melodrama
15 Dr Kaitlyn M. Culliton (Texas A&M University)
Fairy forests and Shakespeare’s sublime: Gothic origins in early-modern drama
'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind': Queering the Gothic in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the stage
24 Prof. Pauline Greenhill (University of Winnipeg) & Dr Heidi Kosonen (University of Winnipeg)
'Something’s not right in Silverhöjd': Crimes against the environment and Scandinavian forest beings in Jordskott
29 Dr Michaela Hausmann (Leipzig University)
An arboreal femme fatale: George MacDonald’s Maid of the Alder-tree and her literary and folkloric roots
10: 15:10 – 15:45 Activity: The creative adaptation of fairy lore in YA fantasy novels
Betsy Cornwell Lyons Writer
Introduced by Bill Hughes
Friday, 9 April 2021
11: 10:00 – 10:40 Plenary: The Cottingley Fairies: Conan Doyle’s war on materialism
Dr Merrick Burrow University of Huddersfield
Introduced by Sam George
12: 10:40 – 11:25 Parallel Session:
Jane Eyre, Gothic changeling: A reluctant outsider
45 Ellen O’Sullivan (University College Cork)
‘Come away, O human child’: Changeling murders in Ireland in the nineteenth century
53 Caroline Roberts (University of Suffolk)
Magical mothering: Creative responses to motherhood through a re-writing of Malekin
Fairy-lands forlorn: Re-enchantment through childhood in children’s fantasy literature
30 Dr Bill Hughes (Open Graves, Open Minds Project)
Fairy carnival: Music, dance, and food in the re-enchantment of modernity from Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist to paranormal romance
55 Dr Rayna Rosanova (Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski)
‘In fairy-lands forlorn’: Keats and the enchanted imagination
13: 11:25 – 11:45 Tea/Coffee Break
14: 11:45 – 12:30 Parallel Session:
Aerial creatures: Fairy women and the Romantic ballet * Cancelled
10 Daisy Butcher (University of Hertfordshire)
Patriarchal control in the ballet La Sylphide (1832), Jane G. Austin’s ‘Prince Rudolf’s Flower’ (1859), and Maleficent (2014)
28 Kate Harvey (University of Stirling)
La Fée Verte: Absinthe and the Green Fairy myth in twenty-first-century Gothic
Fairies and the Celtic Revival in popular Japanese videogames
39 Anna Milon (University of Exeter)
Playing fae: Embodying the uncanny in live action role play
42 Cynthia Nirmala Rajah (English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad)
The Fay in fanfiction: Drabbles and deliberations on psychopathology and power
15: 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
16: 13:30 – 14:10 Plenary: Fairy lepidoptera: The dark history of butterfly-winged Fae
Dr Sam George University of Hertfordshire
Introduced by Bill Hughes
17: 14:10 – 14:30 Tea/Coffee Break
18: 14:30 – 15:15 Parallel Session:
‘The Ballad of Isabel Gunn’ as The Daemon Lover: The economic migrant and enchantment as a recruitment strategy
40 Tam Moules (Independent Researcher, formerly University of Glasgow)
The Gothic aristocracy: Fairies, class, and the power of flight in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin tales
47 Hannah Pike (University of Hertfordshire)
Fae and the Other: Fae identities as threatening in City of Fae by Pippa DaCosta
Human passion – fairy power: Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘The Fairy of the Fountains'
51 Dr Saba S. Razvi (University of Houston, Victoria, Texas)
Faerie light and feminist fire: Depictions of the embattled power and sexuality of faeries in the paranormal romance novels of the Southern Vampire Mystery series and the FaeFever series
60 Cat Stiles (University of Bristol)
Faerie seductions: Faeries, sex, and fragile masculinity in early-modern English poetry
Saturday, 10 April 2021
19: 10:00 – 10:40 Plenary: ‘The fairy kind of writing’: Gothic and the aesthetics of enchantment in the long eighteenth century
Prof. Dale Townsend Manchester Metropolitan University
Introduced by Bill Hughes
20: 10:40 – 11:25 Parallel Session:
Elf-shot and petrified; Scary fairies and predatory landscapes
18 Tatiana Fajardo (University of the Basque Country)
A nineteenth-century influence of Gothic Faerie: The fairy tree, fairy lover, fairy art, and fairy revenge
23 Dr Monica Germana (University of Westminster)
The perpetual hauntings of borderland creatures: Finfolks and selkies in European and Inuit tales of the sea
The origin of the sprites: The Folklore Society’s late-Victorian fairy science
50 Dr Prachi Priyanka (Sharda University)
Victorian fairy painting: Exploring the unknown, forbidden and concealed anxieties of the era
62 Pauline Trotry (Newcastle University)
Naturalisation and gothicisation: The toothed fairies of Guillermo del Toro
21: 11:25 – 11:45 Tea/Coffee Break
22: 11:45 – 12:30 Parallel Session:
The Fairies: Swinging between the oppression and the freedom
27 Jeremy Harte (Folklore Society)
Prisoners of the gods: The captivity narrative in supernatural folklore and fiction
49 Dr Amanda Potter (Open University)
The fairy who wields the sword: Nimue as fairy queen, witch, and warrior in Cursed (2020)
‘Changed by constant retellings’: Carnival Row’s recirculation of fairy and colonialist narratives
44 Dr Joan Ormrod (Manchester Metropolitan University)
‘The magic of England’s trees kills her sunlight, her water, life and stones’: Nature, fairies and national identity in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
57 Kristof Smeyers (University of Antwerp)
Fairy landscapes and the construction of the Belgian nation
23: 12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
24: 13:30 – 14:10 Plenary: Glamourie: Fairies and fashion
Prof. Catherine Spooner Lancaster University
Introduced by Sam George
25: 14:10 – 14:30 Tea/Coffee Break
26: 14:30 – 15:15 Parallel Session:
Ann Radcliffe’s ‘Edwy:’ A Summer Song of Fairie
11 Anna Clifton (University of Birmingham)
Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and the Gothic sea-nymph
33 Györgyi Kovács (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
Fairies in Ann Radcliffe’s poetry
Fairyland: fantasy literature’s queer liminal space
38 Dr Martina Massarente (University of Genoa (DAD)) & Dr Mathias Mochi (Digital Gothic Project)
Fairies, witches and mermaids: The gothic myth and the terrible enchantment of the Dior house in Matteo Garrone’s film
52 Jennifer Richards (Royal College of Art)
Lee and Tinks: The fairytale as muse in the works of Alexander McQueen
Sunday, 11 April 2021
27: 10:00 – 10:40 Plenary: What the Puck! or: An anatomy of the fairy – A spotter’s guide to wings, wands etc.
Dr Ivan Phillips University of Hertfordshire
Introduced by Sam George
28: 10:40 – 11:10 Activity: Fairy Flash Fiction Writing competition
29: 11:10 – 11:55 Single Session:
‘Hoofs and wheels’: Chariots, theology, and myth in Sheridan Le Fanu’s fairy stories
63 Dr Mario Valori (De Digitali Eloquentia – Le belle lettere)
Childe Orfeo to the dark world came
64 Dr Brittany Warman (The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic)
‘You have set yourself to music’: Fairy legend in Oscar Wilde’s Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
30: 11:55 – 12:15 Tea/Coffee Break
31: 12:15 – 13:00 Parallel Session:
‘Fairies of Albion’: Fairies and fairy-lore in the works of William Blake
31 Desmond Huthwaite (University of Cambridge)
Fairy form in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya
59 Sarah Sproston (University of Wolverhampton)
A witch, a vampire, and a pixy walk into a bar: Friendship in urban fantasy
61 Ashleigh Taylor Sullivan (Swansea University)
Dirty deals and catching feels: The figure of the Goblin King in Indie paranormal romance