Rikke Schubart (Research leader)

Rikke Schubart is an associate professor at the Institute of the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. She currently works on women and trauma in fantastic film and television. Her research is on the fantastic, emotions, and gender, and combines biocultural theory and cognitive theory with a feminist approach. Her most recent publication is Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), which analyses fiction horror as play with negative emotions. Another publication is Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements (Bloomsbury, 2016, edited with Anne Gjelsvik).

You can read Schubart's blog entry "Care and Careful Politics in a Dystopian World" on the network blog here. 

 Amanda Howell

Amanda Howell teaches courses on American and world cinemas in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on gender, genre, and screen aesthetics, with a recurrent emphasis on the gothic and horror as ways of representing and understanding the past and the challenges of everyday life. She has published on gothic representations of history and war, on vampires and coming-of-age, on the horrors of the family and mothering in film and television. She is co-editor of special journal issues 'Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful’(2017), ‘Beyond Nostalgia: Difference and Discomfort in Stranger Things’ (Forthcoming 2018) and ‘As if: Women in Genres of the Fantastic, Cross-Platform Entertainments and Transmedial Engagements’ (Forthcoming 2019). She has been granted study leave in 2019 to work on a book-length study of contemporary arthouse horror.

Angela Ndalianis

 Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor in Media and Entertainment and Co-director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on entertainment media histories; media convergence; and the baroque as a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon. Her current research explores the important role played by entertainment culture in the advancement of robotics and automata. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press 2004), Science Fiction Experiences (2010), The Horror Sensorium; Media and the Senses (2012) and the edited books The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (editor, 2009), Neo-baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (2016, co-edited), and Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (Routledge, 2017, co-edited). She has published numerous essays in refereed journals and anthologies and is currently working on three books: Batman: Myth and Superhero; Robots and Entertainment Culture; and Experiencing Space: Sensory Encounters from Baroque Rome to Neo-Baroque Las Vegas (with Dr. Lisa Beaven, La Trobe University).

Anita Nell Bech Albertsen

Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, Assistant Professor (Ph.D.) teaches courses on Danish literature, literary theory, Media, and Creative Writing at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. Her current research projects focus on narratology, impossible narrative time in literature, transmedia (fantastic) characters and “poverty porn” in contemporary Danish literature and reality TV. In English, she has published on complex female mashup characters in Penny Dreadful “The Contaminant Cobweb: Complex Characters and Monstrous Mashups” (2017), which is published in a co-edited special journal issue Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful (2017) for Refractory: A journal of entertainment media 28, 2017.

Cristina Bacchilega

Cristina Bacchilega is a Professor at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she teaches fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. She co-edits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies; her most recent publications are the book Fairy Tales Transformed? 21^st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder and essays in Narrative Culture, Journal of the Fantastic in the Art, Routledge Companion to Fairy-Tale Cultures and Media, and The Fairy Tale World. With Anne Duggan, she co-edited the 2019 “Thinking with Stories in Times of Trouble” special issues of Journal of American Folklore, Marvels & Tales, and Narrative Culture. 

 Jakob Ion Wille

Jakob Ion Wille is an associated professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design and head of Production Design master program, and Game & Production Design Bachelor program at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Besides doing research in production design and co-editing the Danish Film Institute’s research journal Kosmorama, he has been working as a scriptwriter, script consultant and consultant on exhibition design. In 2012-2014 participating in a project on classical music and experience design, funded by EU. His Ph.D. thesis was on production design and film as design. Currently he is involved in a research project with The National Danish Film School and Aalborg University on Story World building and previsualization technologies. 

 Jesper Juul 

Jesper Juul has been working with video game research since the late 1990's. He is an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Design and a Visiting Associate Professor at MIT. Prior to this, he helped start some of the world’s leading master programs in game design at IT University of Copenhagen and New York University Game Center. He has published three books with MIT Press: Half-Real (2005), A Casual Revolution (2009) and The Art of Failure (2013). He is also a co-editor of the Playful Thinking Series (also on MIT Press). He has worked as a game developer and programmer and is currently working on a book on independent video games. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on video games and other important things.

 Marc Malmdorf Andersen

Marc Malmdorf Andersen is a postdoctoral researcher on the ‘PlayTrack project’ at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research focuses on combining quantitative and qualitative measures to study play, playfulness and immersion in experimental situations and in ecological field situations.  His previous research has focused on the development of new methods to study religious sensory experiences, where he has utilized mobile and stationary eye tracking; Virtual Reality; and sensory deprivation techniques. Some of his most recent experimental work has been done on Ouija Boards, a fascinating phenomenon that sits squarely in the intersection between the playful and the paranormal (find the study here). For more information, see his university homepage. 

 Mathias Clasen

Mathias Clasen is associate professor of literature and media in the English Department, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on horror across media, and he has developed a biocultural framework for the analysis of scary entertainment. He is interested in particular in the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of this peculiarly popular phenomenon. Clasen has published on horror video games, slasher films, Stephen King, zombies, vampires, the personality of horror fans, haunted attractions, and other spooky subjects. His research monograph Why Horror Seduces was released in 2017 on Oxford University Press. His 2017 TEDx talk, “Lessons from a terrified horror researcher,” is available on YouTube. For more information, see his university homepage.

 Stephanie Green

Dr Stephanie Green lectures in writing and supervises creative research at Griffith University’s School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences. She has been widely published as an author and academic, with studies in creative writing, biography and screen culture. Her recent international research collaborations include: Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture (co-edited with Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska and David Baker) London: Palgrave, 2017; Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful (co-edited with Rikke Schubart, Amanda Howell and Anita Nell Bech Albertson) for Refractory: a journal of entertainment media 28 2017; and Romanticism and Contemporary Australian Writing (co-edited with Paul Hetherington) for TEXT Journal 41 2017. Her scholarly articles include: ‘The Deflected Subject: ethics, objects and writing,’ Axon 1.1 2012 and ‘Dexter Morgan’s Monstrous Origins, CST 6:1 2011.

You can read Green's blog entry "Remaking Enchantment" on the network blog here. 

 Stephen Joyce

Stephen Joyce is an Associate Professor in Media, Communication, and Culture at Aarhus University and has just finished a book on transmedia storytelling and the rise of the post-apocalyptic genre (called, imaginatively, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse). One of his main research interests is how the modern media eco-system enables the rise of immersive transmedia storyworlds. Generally speaking, he's interested in production-of-culture approaches that look at aspects such as media franchising, reception approaches based around fan communities, and the textual strategies employed to enable continuity and multiplicity across the storyworld. Personal favourites include Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead, so if you want any tips on surviving the end of the world, then he's probably one of the right people to ask.

  Student Helper

 Cecilie Kirstine Thoke Knudsen (Student Worker): cek@sdu.dk