Department of Humanities

"Much can be made of the influence of new technologies in shaping spaces for fandom, and in shaping the nature of fandoms, leading to essays on the development of online fan communities and the changes wrought by web 2.0.

However, the intertextuality of fan experience does not remain on the screen. Fan ‘craft’, such as the knitting patterns to replicate the Firefly/Serenity character Jayne’s hat, involves the use of older technology to reshape the fictional into the physical, leading to intense debates about copyright and authorship. Bringing a physical item across the boundary from the fictional realm in this manner disrupts the dissemination of cultural items as monetised commodity.

This paper examines the ways in which new and old technologies are used by fans and producers alike to mould and shape an intertextual world, in which the boundaries between real and unreal, physical and immaterial, are increasingly blurred. 

Savvy producers are recognising the meta-textuality of self-reflexive fan culture: before the release of Iron Man 2 a corporate site went live for a subsidiary of the fictional Stark Industries and ‘recruiters’ for the firm attended San Diego ComicCon. However, this strategy disrupts the traditional advertising modes; the fictional corporation logo on a t-shirt does not necessarily directly link the uninitiated to a purchasable product such as a film or book. Memorabilia advertising aspects of a fictional world, such as promotional t-shirts for fictional businesses, are popular in cult fandom; encouraging the market for collectibles, and the display of insider knowledge, whilst preserving a distance from the corporate media who own the rights to the texts themselves.

Drawing on Michael Saler’s analysis of the ‘literary prehistory of virtual reality’ this paper suggests that cult fandom uses the widest rage of technology available to its practitioners to establish and maintain a disenchantment/reenchantment dialectic. By embedding the physical manifestations of their favourite fictional world into their IRL existence, fans are not simply living the escapist fantasies of modern Walter Mitty’s. In fact, fan craft activity and independent purchasing reshapes the world to resemble their preferred fictional environment, whilst attempting to defy or reinterpret models of ownership and authority.
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The practice of compiling excerpts from texts and visual art related to an object of fan affection has been consistently employed in Anglo-American fandom since the eighteenth century. Tumblr and Pinterest enable fans to collate and share content in much the same manner as commonplace books and scrapbooks of the past two hundred years. Interestingly, both digital and paper-based modes have become loaded with the cultural associations of femininity.

Commonplace books circulated within domestic spaces, in an era in which women's participation in public life was severely curtailed and the majority of cultural producers were male. The public nature of Tumblr dashboards enables fans to find each other readily, and join networks of like-minded others not limited by geography, however, it leaves fans open to public interpretation of highly specific group practice. Though the public sphere is no longer as exclusively male as it was at the turn of the nineteenth  century, the majority of cultural producers are still male. Spaces dominated by fan practices, such as Tumblr and Pinterest are, by contrast, culturally becoming coded as feminine.

Drawing particularly on feminist critiques and developments of Habermas' work on the public sphere, this paper explores the cultural constructions of binary pairs producer/consumer, active/passive, private/public, and male/female as applied to the study of fan practices. Are these inherently female modes of consumption and engagement with cultural productions? Or, are the practices of the disenfranchised within patriarchal power dynamics of production coded as feminine by a misunderstanding of their 'passive' consumer positioning? Changes in cultural and technological mores have radically changed the spaces available to women, and audiences in general, but a continuity of practice remains. Simply, this paper asks why?

A psychiatrist narrates what at first appears to be a patient’s story, then a friend’s story involving a patient, that increasingly becomes his own story through his narrative choices. Are we then - as reader - an audience, a confidant, a witness, perhaps the narrator’s own therapist? Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (1996) sets up these subject positions within the text, both as characters and as possible reading positions, and then blurs the boundaries. Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, as the television show Hannibal (2013 -2015), develops the same technique. The entire third (final?) season of the series is devoted to psychiatrists and psychological profilers, who may also be murderers and lovers, debating agency, observation, participation, and responsibility. The focus of all this psychiatric narration is the same; sex and death.

This paper explores the disruption of genre and the text/audience dynamic in these fictions about analysis, analysts, adulterers, and murderers.  Asylum reads like literary fiction; described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’i it yet treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror. Fuller has declared, repeatedly, that Hannibal is not ‘television [but] a pretentious 80’s arthouse movie’. However, it opens with the structure and conventions of the serial investigative procedural. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured, like the bodies of the victims, the psyches of the characters, and the perspective of the audience. Just who is taking whom to pieces?

Fear, Horror and Terror can be seen as the defining experiences and political tools of modernity, shaping public spaces, discourse, and popular culture. This is the era of the 'War on Terror', in which terror is politically, culturally, even racially defined. We are constantly confronted with, consuming, and discussing media images of horror, both fictional and factual. This year's 10th interdisciplinary Fear, Horror and Terror conference explores the production and dissemination these concepts and experiences as a political, cultural, and media commodity. We invite participants to consider questions such as:
~ How fear, horror, and terror manifest in everyday life, popular culture, fiction, society, communities and politics?
~ How experiences or images produced by/about fear, horror and terror shape or direct the way we understand the world?
~ What are the underlying power structures that determine how and why representations of fear, horror and terror are disseminated, and to whom?
~ How can we communicate, contain and overcome the effects and consequences of fear, horror and terror?

The materials available to the fan bricoleur vary, as fashions in art and media technologies develop, and creative spaces are now largely digital rather than physical, but practices remain strikingly the same from paper to screen. Commonplace books were compiled in private, domestic spaces, but were also performative – left out to impress visitors with their owners' erudition, or given to friends and lovers to cement private and public bonds. In the digital era, these activities are similarly practiced in publically accessible online spaces. A complex history of women's responses to culture is recorded in these texts.

A tale of police corruption, focused on a series of murders of young girls, set in a post-industrial small towns in the late twentieth century. HBO television series True Detective (2014) and the Channel Four films that make up the Red Riding Trilogy (2009) are basically telling the same story. These two series share a focus; they examine in detail the specific cultural traditions, local social norms, and the geography that sustains and enables masculine dominance and abusive patriarchal power structures. I suggest that these two series are inherently, inescapably gothic. That this gothic is in the places, and the people, that they depict. These are series focussed on the world of the police investigation of the monster known as the serial killer, and the surrounding culture in which the crimes occur. The identities of the serial killers, the detectives and witnesses, are related to their physical environments; regional identity is as fundamental as gender identity. And these identities are as toxic as the post-industrial decay in the environment in which they developed.

The setting for gothic fictions is very often domestic, which is a descriptor with distinctly feminine connotations, particularly given the centrality of the home and family life in the female gothic. Much critical work following Ellen Moers focused on gothic authors’ articulations of women’s dissatisfaction with patriarchal norms that trapped them within the home. Despite the association between domesticity and femininity, these home environments are very often owned by, and ruled by men.

When Jane Eyre rails against the limitations placed upon women through this alignment of domesticity and femininity, she compares her situation and herself to the masculine norms of a patriarchal society saying that women feel ‘just as men do’. But how do men feel? How are men positioned within these homes, and these texts? The proposed paper explores the representation of men’s anxieties about their domestic identities - as fathers, sons, and heads of households – in the Victorian gothic novel, concentrating particularly on the figures of Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, and Philip Pirrip. This paper traces the parallels in characterisation between Miss Havisham and Heathcliff, in their passionate responses to romantic rejection and their desire to control the next generation, and the construction of the figure of the gentleman through the experiences Rochester and Pip, to explore the intersection of class and gender in the construction of the domestic masculinity in the mid-Victorian gothic.

Like horror movies, heavy metal and hip-hop are often thought of as genres created for, and yet a source of harm to, marginalised youth. Labelled monstrous, seeming to embody hyper-masculine aggression and misogyny, these musical forms also enable a gothic space where non-normative masculinities can flourish; exploring not only experiences of violence, but mental health problems and feelings of isolation, with sympathy and depth. This paper explores the Gothic as a space of masculine self-expression for three bands from the mid-eighties to mid-nineties; Metallica, Gravediggaz, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate critically the British government’s responses to neo-jihadist terrorism during the period 2005-2015. The first section of the thesis will identify the most recent and relevant historiography on the nature and scope of the threat to Britain from Jihadist terrorism during the period 2005-2015. This dissertation seeks to investigate and assess these sources, evaluating their relative importance against data, surveys and samples that are presented to us by their authors. Identifying the framework and structure of neo-jihadist terrorism is fundamental to the research. Indeed, the outcome of this thesis will be in support of narratives that argue we are in a phase of neo-Jihadism, neo meaning new. Therefore, this paper argues against theories perpetuated by the likes of historians such as Bruce Hoffman, who conversely argues that the threat has remained the same: Al Qaeda and similar organisations are still very much alive and have a stronghold in the West.  Working against Hoffman’s framework, it will be demonstrated how this wave of neo-Jihadist terrorism is fluid in its structure. This also equates to the threat becoming more ‘homegrown’; the threat is no longer top-down in its structure and does not come from terrorist cells functioning in the Middle East. Conversely, the structure of the threat is bottom-up, with individuals already having infiltrated the blue zone (blue denoting friendly). 
Succeeding this assessment on the structure and nature of the threat in the United Kingdom, the following section of this research will seek to identify whether the British government has responded proportionately in accordance with this change in the structure of neo-Jihadism. Throughout this section of the research, there will be an open dialogue between the historiography and the British government’s position as outlined in their counterterrorism strategy: CONTEST. It will be illustrated that overall, the British government has not been consistent in their response to neo-Jihadism in the United Kingdom and has therefore not demonstrated a proportional nor impartial reaction.
Finally, this research will seek to evade the mistakes made by the British government and will evaluate and address the problems that have been arisen because of the British government’s warped approach on counterterrorism. It will be illustrated that Muslim communities have noted feeling a sense of stigmatisation, and such feelings have been fuelled and encouraged by government funded projects that blur the boundaries between surveillance, policing and education.

4,000 word essay completed as part of an I.R. module on U.S. foreign policy. Achieved 85/100, First Class. The essay considers the exaggeration of George Kennan's ideals by the Truman Administration regarding the Soviet threat and U.S. policy, as well as drawing upon the exaggeration of the Soviet threat through the drafting of NSC-68.

Final year dissertation thesis analysing U.S. strategy - initial, shift of, and development of - at the 1945 Potsdam Conference. Draws heavily on conference minutes and personal memoirs, and considers the acquired knowledge of U.S. nuclear capabilities (Manhattan project) as a key catalyst in the shift in U.S. approach.