We have some fabulous, dazzlingly erudite keynotes:
Betsy Cornwell, YA novelist; author of the selkie novel Tides, on her forthcoming memoir, Ring of Salt, which draws on Gothic selkie folklore.
Betsy Cornwell is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and historical novels for young people. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times’s Modern Love column, Fairy Tale Review, Parabola magazine, and elsewhere. She received the Irish Writers Centre’s first Blue Mountains (Australia) residency and a Markievicz Award for her work on this book. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a BA from Smith College, and teaches at the University of Galway. She is the founder of the arts retreat space the Old Knitting Factory.
Dr Katie Garner, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of St Andrews; on ‘Forging the mermaid in Romantic Scotland’.
Dr Katie Garner is a senior lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of St Andrews with specialisms in women’s writing, myth and folklore, and the Gothic. Her first book, Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge (Palgrave, 2017), explores how women’s imaginative responses to the Arthurian legend were affected by censorship, abridgement and translation. She has published extensively on nineteenth-century Arthuriana, including travel writing and children’s books. With Nicholas Roe, she edited John Keats and Romantic Scotland (Oxford UP, 2022), celebrating Keats’s tour of Scotland in 1818.
She has been working on mermaids since 2018, when she received funding from the Carnegie Trust to explore Scottish mermaid poems and sightings. Mermaids will feature in her next book about Romantic women poets and the sea. Today she’ll be talking about the funding she has received to work on Scottish mermaids, some of the outcomes of that research, and sharing her experience writing grant applications that include mermaids or other water myths.
Katie will be talking about the funding she has received to work on Scottish mermaids, some of the outcomes of that research, and sharing her experience writing grant applications that include mermaids or other water myths.
Dr Sam George, Associate Professor, University of Hertfordshire, Co-Convenor of the OGOM Project; on ‘The luck of the Ningyō: Hybridity and the rise of the fake museum mermaid’.
Prof. Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University; on ‘Mermaid Glitter: Fish Scales, Queer Plastic and Vibrant Femininities’.
Prof. Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, UK, where she teaches English Literature and Creative Writing, and researches Gothic in literature, fashion and popular culture from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. She is the author of three academic monographs: Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004), Contemporary Gothic (2006) and Post-Millennial Gothic (2017). She has also co-edited four books including, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries (2021). Her work has twice been awarded prizes by the International Gothic Association for advancing the field of Gothic Studies. She is also a prize-winning writer of poetry and fiction with a Gothic slant; her latest creative work will appear in the anthology Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire’s Castle, forthcoming later this year from Sidekick Books.
