Here in Sydney, it’s cold, rainy, and we’re in the midst of another greater city-wide lockdown. You know what that means? Perfect TV binging time!
In my latest story for Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse, I wrote about why modern television loves to revisit and reimagine the Victorian era, and reviewed three of my recent Victorian-era TV binges (including The Nevers, pictured above)!
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Do you believe in ghosts? Earlier this year I had the pleasure of being interviewed about all things ghosts and ghost stories by an incredibly talented group of students from the Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language and Literature in Macquarie University’s Faculty of Arts (where I currently lead the Master of Research program). These students were producing a short documentary around the infamous ghost legends attached to a lonely stretch of road called The Wakehurst Parkway in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (I was also recently interviewed about that for a newspaper article: read here), and they were an absolute blast to work with.
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I’m very excited to share my latest article “The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier” which is included in The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. This article is the first examination of Lucas Malet’s work against the exciting Victorian phenomenon of the supernatural fourth dimension. While much of my research has focused on space, the supernatural and the fourth dimension, this article is my first published foray into the wonderful writing of Lucas Malet.
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I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Nadine Morton from local Sydney magazine The Northern Beaches Review about all things spectral and spooky for the February 24 cover story on local ghost legends and the various hauntings and spectral spots that dot the Northern Coastal regions of Sydney. The story itself is well worth a read, with many spine-chilling tales from around the area. I weighed in from my Gothic and supernatural literary perspective on what it is about ghost stories that makes them so appealing to us time and time again. The story was also run in The Canberra Times.
Read the interview and the full story below!
The Northern Beaches Review: https://www.northernbeachesreview.com.au/story/7135446/is-the-parkway-ghost-linked-to-a-real-missing-person/?cs=20192
Or flick through the digital magazine: https://digital-print-edition.austcommunitymedia.com.au/NBR/2021/02/24/3dissue/index.html
The Canberra Times: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7142563/is-this-well-known-ghost-linked-to-a-real-missing-person/
I am excited to learn that an edited collection I contributed to is a finalist in the 2020 Mythopoeic Awards! Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy (2018), edited by Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey-Johnson, is nominated in the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies.
This is a wonderful collection to be a part of, and this award nomination is testament to the excellent scholarship and dedicated editing that went into this volume. Emerging out of the George MacDonald Society conference held at the University of Oxford in 2014, this collection represents much of the new and exciting scholarship emerging around Victorian author George MacDonald, and his contemporaries like Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Andrew Lang and more. This volume explores how these Victorian writers and their contexts helped pave the way for modern fantasy as we know it in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and the Inklings.
The essay I was honoured to contribute is called ‘Dreaming into Hyperspace: The Victorian Spatial Imagination and the Origins of Modern Fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll.’
Read more about this volume in my earlier blog post.
Purchase this book online in a range of places, including here.
Recently I collaborated once more with Dr Stephanie Russo and Dr Jimmy Van on Macquarie University’s From the Lighthouse podcast to record a series of discussions based around one thing we all have in common: a love for teen movie adaptations of classic literature! From films like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, which have become 90s classics in their own right (and indelibly marked my own teenage years), to a range of weird and wonderful adaptations in the years since, we tackle the ups and downs of turning classic literature into teen film, what we love and loathe about these productions, the advantages and pitfalls of fidelity to the ‘original’ text, and the evergreen question of what makes a good adaptation. Invariably, these discussions also invited a lot of introspection and reflection on our own teenagehoods, and I found it particularly interesting to trace the ways that these films shaped our own varied experiences of being teenagers, and even, in some cases, our journeys into studying and researching literature and its contexts for a living. I will share more of these episodes as they become available below:
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Kirstin Mills is an Australian artist, writer, lecturer and researcher following her endless curiosity into realms of imagination and wonder. Read more about her life & projects here.
