It’s always great to receive copies of books we’re in, but seeing Fairies: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2025) made real is a particularly special moment for me because – for the first time – my academic and artistic passions have been brought together between the covers of one book.
My research chapter, ‘Fairies and Science: The Fairy-Land of Science,’ considers how these two concepts interweave across time. It links the fairies that appear in nineteenth-century scientific literature (e.g. Arabella Buckley’s The Fairy-land of Science, which uses fairies to explain the concepts of physics and chemistry) with contemporary fairies like TV’s Winx Club, which extend the link between fairies and science to include digital technology as a kind of magic. I fell in love with Winx Club during my undergrad days, and I loved being able to write about it here, bringing it into conversation with my nineteenth-century research!
Appearing elsewhere in this book are two of my artworks, dug from my archives of fairy illustration (painted during my PhD days!) because I simply couldn’t pass up the beautiful opportunity to house my creative and academic pursuits under one roof! (pictured above)
Huge thanks to the editors, Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Simon Bacon, for this milestone opportunity. It’s fantastic to be in such a great collection, and particularly special to have this full-circle moment!
Check out the book here: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1400115
