Author Biographies
Chia-Cheng, Hsu has a PhD from the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, College of Liberal Arts at the National Taiwan Normal University (2024) and a master’s degree from the Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Tsing Hua University (2006). Chia-Cheng’s research focuses on Taiwan folklore, contemporary legends and aboriginal literature. The topic of her doctoral dissertation is ‘Research on Taiwan’s Contemporary Legends: Implications of Legends in Current Taiwan’s Politics, Literature, Pop Culture, and Disasters’ and her MA thesis explored the translation, fabrication and application of oral literature.
Dr David Clarke is Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and a co-founder, with Dr Diane A. Rodgers and Andrew Robinson, of the Centre for Contemporary Legend (CCL). From 2008-13 he acted as curator for the UK National Archives open government project that oversaw the release of the MoD’s UFO archive. His most recent book, UFO Drawings at The National Archives, was published in 2017 by Four Corners Books. He is Project Lead for the UKRI AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England, a two-year project that ran in 2025-26.
Douglas Clarke is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is interested in the intersection of death and visual culture in Caribbean religious traditions, as well as the religious understanding of the human skeleton.
Dr. Daniel P. Compora is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toledo specializing in undergraduate education. An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Compora has research interests in various areas, including literature, folklore, popular culture, and educational technology. Recent publications include Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Mythmaking: Jack Sawyer as an American Hero (2025); Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Godzilla’: An American Kaiju Anthem (2024); Nowhere is Safe: Suburban Terror in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Shocker, and Scream (2023); Toxic Nostalgia in Stephen King’s IT (2022); and Dystopian Literature at a Distance (2022).
Sandy Feinstein has published poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarship that reflects on the past as it informs the present and how the present informs how we read the past. While on a Fulbright Award to Syria, she explored the confluence of ‘local’ legends. Her poems on Syria have been collected in a chapbook, Swimming to Syria (Penumbra, 2021) and appear in journals, including Princeton Arts Review, Facture, Connecticut River Review, and Redheaded Stepchild. She has written on how heritage management informs Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and how Victorian science shapes Stoker’s Dracula.
Inmaculada Paz Hurtado is a PhD student at the University of Málaga. She studied for a degree in English Studies (2020) and an MA in English Studies and Multilingual and Intercultural Communication (2021), alongside a Master’s in Education at the University of Málaga (2023). Her academic interests include rewritings in contemporary literature, Gothic fiction, the Romantic novels and socio-psychological and feminist approaches to literature and culture. She is currently focused on Jane Austen’s intertextuality in modern narratives.
Dr Megan Kenny is a writer, folklorist, parapsychologist and researcher. Research interests include folklore (and folk horror), the social and cultural significance of paranormal belief and explorations of horror cinema. Recent work explores the erotic and the abject, liminality in David Lynch’s cinema, cannibal women in horror cinema and the legacy of Medusa. Megan is co-host of the Monstrous Flesh podcast.
John Quinn is a lecturer in Screen at the University of the West of Scotland, specialising in popular film and television. His research explores representations of masculinity, criminality, and liminality in fiction and documentary texts. His forthcoming publications examine themes such as urban legends in digital spaces, frontier identities in sci-fi narratives, and Batman’s body as a site of meaning construction. Additionally, John is developing a series of video essays analysing the Alien cinematic universe and its cultural messaging.
Emily Naser-Hall is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Film Program at Western Carolina University. Her research focuses on post-1945 American literature and film, cultural narratives, and the intersection of law and literature. Her work on Shirley Jackson has been featured in Arizona Quarterly and Studies in the American Short Story, with a forthcoming article in Shirley Jackson Studies. She has also published on Gothic domesticity, sexuality, and labour and is working on a book chapter on the Gothic frontier in American folk horror.
Sophie Parkes-Nield is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England project (nationalfolkloresurvey.co.uk) at Sheffield Hallam University. She completed her practice-based PhD in 2024 at the same university where she is also an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing. She also teaches at Leeds Arts University. Sophie is a Reviews Editor at Folklore journal. She has published a novel, short fiction, music journalism, and life writing under the name Sophie Parkes. sophieparkes.co.uk
Andrew Robinson is a photographer, artist, and Senior Lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University, where he co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend (CCL) with Dr David Clarke and Dr Diane Rodgers. His art practice investigates expressions of identity and material culture through a visual anthropology of people, place, and trace. Research interests include: the visual representation of vernacular English custom and tradition; the folklore, myth and legend associated with photographs and photographers; and photography in print and archive. Recent outputs have explored subjects as diverse as the photography of the Crimean War, lover’s leap legends, English calendar customs, AI-generated imagery, and the Calvine UFO. Recent book chapters include: ‘Expressions Of Contemporary English Custom, Myth And Legend In Response To Covid19’ in Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID (Utah State University Press, 2023) and ‘Photographic Surveys Of Calendar Customs: Preserving Identity In Times Of Change’ in Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland (Routledge, 2021).
Dr Diane A. Rodgers is Senior Lecturer and co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Her background is in film studies, specialising in teaching alternative media (including cult TV, film, music and comics), and storytelling in film and television, including textual analysis and folklore. Diane completed her PhD research in folk horror and hauntology in 1970s British Television and her research interests include the communication of folklore and Contemporary Legend across all types of media. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Folklore, Revenant and Journal of British Cinema and Television, has chapters in Folk Horror on Film (2023), The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023) and Nigel Kneale and Horror (2025) and co-edited The Legacy of The X-Files (2023). Diane is currently completing her monograph Wyrd TV: Folklore, Folk Horror and Television, to be published by the BFI in 2026.
Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby is a professor of Russian, Folklore and Linguistics at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses on Russian and American folklore. Her research centers on contemporary legend and vernacular religion in Russia and the United States. She is the author of Sacred Springs in the Camps: Gulag Memory. Legend, and Place (University of Wisconsin Press). This book explores how legends about three holy springs on former prison camps reframe the memory of the (Soviet) Russian past, reveal how religion is lived in the wake of the Russian Orthodox revival after the collapse of the USSR, and reflect important facets of contemporary Russian religion, politics, and society.
Dr Hannah Singleton is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Performance within Manchester School of Art, teaching theory units with a particular emphasis on material cultures, place and identity. Recent work explores séance in contemporary art practice and archives of mediumship; the legacy of the Pendle Witches through the analysis of material culture, artworks and landscape; writing in development connects folk horror, objects, and craft within filmic landscapes. Her PhD research explored the physical and immaterial traces of performance and temporal artworks through alternative and artistic archival approaches. Member of the Dark Arts Research Kollective (DVRK) at MMU, and member of The Stones Project – examining how we represent and experience ancient and modern standing stones focusing on themes of affect, materiality, mythology and temporality.
Carolyn Waudby is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and a prize-winning poet who has worked with photographers, artists and community groups. As a journalist, Carolyn writes for national and international publications. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines, including Magma, Haiku Quarterly, The Reader, Staple, Mslexia, and The Rockvale Review. In 2019, Apus, a chapbook of poems inspired by Frida Kahlo, was published by The Red Ceilings Press. Collaborating with a multimedia artist she wrote a poetry-based script for Cradle of Fire, a short film on Roman god Vulcan and the steel city of Sheffield, UK.