Unlike fear, my earliest encounters with the Gothic were marked by a sense of inscrutable sadness.

Long before I knew the term “gothic,” I was immersed in stories of monsters, ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural beings. As a child, I watched television adaptations of Journey to the West at my grandparents’ house, where the Monkey King battled shapeshifting monsters seeking the monk’s flesh to attain immortality. During middle and high school, I read incomplete online translations of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and searched obsessively for vampire films, from Nosferatu and Dracula to Interview with the Vampire and Van Helsing. I borrowed books by Edgar Allan Poe from the local library and listened to friends’ stories about haunted mansions, abandoned amusement parks, and ghosts lingering in rural landscapes where I grew up.

Yet what puzzled me was that these stories rarely frightened me. Instead, they filled me with sorrow. Rather than accepting the narratives that doomed monstrous beings to destruction, I found myself imagining alternatives. While drawing the spider sisters, snake lady, and ox-elephant brothers from Journey to the West, I wondered why they desired the monk’s flesh and whether they had other choices. What histories shaped them? What suffering had they endured? Would immortality truly make them happy?

These questions haunted me. I felt an increasing sadness for creatures whose destinies seemed predetermined by erasure. As I became fascinated with vampires, that feeling deepened. Watching Nosferatu as a teenager, I felt drawn not to the heroes but to the lonely vampire inhabiting a decaying castle. The dilapidated architecture, the faded history, the longing for connection, and the film’s melancholic atmosphere all seemed profoundly sorrowful. In Interview with the Vampire, I wept for Lestat rather than Louis. In Van Helsing, I imagined a happy ending for Dracula and his brides. The nameless ghosts of rural folklore also inspired more sympathy than fear. If they truly existed, I wondered, could they somehow be helped? Was being a ghost inseparable from loss, solitude, and despair?

It was not until I began formally studying the Gothic that I came to terms with this recurring emotion. It dwelled on me that the sorrow might reveal something fundamental about the gothic mode itself. Gothic narratives stage decline, vulnerability, and tragedy while probing questions about existence, mortality, and meaning. Amid darkness, they illuminate truths that resist simple moral divisions.

That sorrow remains with me, but I no longer try to explain it away. Instead, I recognize it as a generative force behind my interest in gothic horror. It taught me that the value of the Gothic lies not only in comprehending what is fearful but also in exploring ethical relationships with radical alterity. Gothic narratives invite us to feel for beings deemed monstrous, to imagine alternatives to their destruction, and to challenge anthropocentric forms of justice grounded in exclusion and erasure. Rather than affirming violence, the Gothic has taught me a form of attentiveness that feels urgently relevant today: the capacity to extend tenderness toward beings radically different from ourselves.

My first encounter with the Gothic was an immersive experience. I came face-to-face with fear and fascination for the first time in a dream! I was seven at the time. One night, I lay awake thinking about the death of a character in a storybook. I wanted to know where the dead go. As I drifted in and out of sleep, a dream began to form.

I’m standing alone at the entrance of a cave. The cave looks dark and mysterious, beckoning me to enter. I climb in. I’m immediately surrounded by eerie colors – they’re coming from strange plants and creatures sprawled across the cave walls, exuding a supernatural glow. I hear hisses, growls, and whispers. Unnatural shadows and voices dance around me. Something stirs in the darkness. It’s restless and angry, and it’s coming toward me. I realize it’s a ghost! I run for my life…

I woke up scared and excited at the same time. For days afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. I sought answers from my parents, but they dismissed my encounter as a silly dream. Their disinterest triggered something explosive inside me. I sat down and turned my dream into a short story – the very first story I had ever written.

It wasn’t until many years later that I recognized my story’s Gothic trajectory: it has a complete arc with a dark beginning, middle, and end! There is a troubled protagonist, a disturbing inciting incident, a supernatural antagonist, a terrifying “rock bottom” moment (where the protagonist realizes he is going to die if he doesn’t fight back), and an epic battle between Good and Evil. Darkness, fear, rage, and despair infiltrate every line, along with blood and gore (definitely not PG-rated). In the end, my protagonist makes it out of the cave alive, but he is no longer the same person. I began to wonder if he emerges alone after all.

I realized I might have brought back a ghost with me that night.

My ghost stayed invisible until one day, it manifested during a very difficult time in my life when I had hit rock bottom. My ghost grew bigger and angrier. It finally leaped from the pages of my short story onto my graduate school application essay and dragged me straight to its writing program. My ghost whispered stories of deaths and rebirths into my ears. It told me to fight back with my blood and tears so I can rewrite my destiny. It commanded me to help others make sense of loss, grief, and pain through writing and teaching the Gothic. And this time, I faced the ghost instead of running away. I stared into its eyes, and I found myself.

I’ve been writing and advocating Gothic stories ever since. My first encounter with the Gothic was not only immersive but also transformative! I’m proud to say I’m no longer afraid of my ghost because now I know it has always been there to empower me!

Attention all graduate and postgraduate students (MA, MPhil, PhD, etc.!)

If you are attending the IGA Conference in Hull this summer, you are eligible to apply for a small travel bursary (£100) to assist with travel costs.

Please note that to apply, you must confirm that you are a current IGA member and that you have registered for the conference.

Please also note that the IGA will only be able to pay this out via PAYPAL (International) or Bank transfer (UK accounts only).

You can find the Postgraduate Student Bursary Application form here.

The deadline for applications is 31 May 2026.

We look forward to seeing you all in Hull at the end of July!

The IGA executive Team

Now that all nominations have been received and verified, it is a pleasure to announce the longlists for the two IGA book Prizes. Five monographs were nominated for the Alan Lloyd Smith prize, and eight essay collections were nominated for the Justin D. Edwards prize, with many books receiving multiple nominations. The resulting longlists are as follows:

Longlist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for Best Monograph 2026:

• Dale Townshend, Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture (University of Wales Press, 2024)
• Emma McEvoy, The Music of the Gothic, 1789-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Rebecca Wynne-Walsh, New Basque Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2025)
• David Ashford, A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Joana Jacob Ramalho, Memory and the Gothic Aesthetic in Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Longlist for the Justin D. Edwards Prize for Best Edited Collection 2026

• Nick Groom and William Hughes, eds., The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
• Andrew Smith, ed., The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
• Robert Edgar, Lauren Stephenson and John Marland, eds., Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television (Bloomsbury, 2024)
• John Whatley, ed., The Gothic in Times of Crisis (Manchester University Press, 2025)
• Carol Margaret Davison, ed., Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Barbara Chamberlin, Julia Round, and Kom Kunyosying, eds., Horror and Comics (University of Wales Press, 2025)
• Sam George and Bill Hughes, eds., The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Ruth Heholt and Jo Parsons, eds., Ghosts and the Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2025)

All nominations will be assessed by a panel of past winners and presidents of the IGA. The Chair for the prize panels is Joseph Crawford. The Secretary for the prize is Alexia Ainsworth. A shortlist will be published on the IGA website by the middle of July. The prizes will be presented (or, if a winning author is not present, announced) during the conference which, this year, is hosted at the University of Hull, July 28-31 2026.

Congratulations to all nominees!

In 2011, as a memorial to its founding President Dr Allan Lloyd Smith (1945-2010), the International Gothic Association established the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize, to be awarded for a scholarly publication considered to have significantly advanced the field of Gothic studies.

In 2024, the International Gothic Association inaugurated a new prize to honour the memory of Justin D. Edwards (1970-2023), past co-president of the IGA and beloved colleague and friend. The Justin D. Edwards Memorial Prize is to be awarded for an edited collection considered to have significantly advanced the field of Gothic studies.

For the current round of nominations, monographs and edited collections published between January 1st 2024 to December 31st 2025 are eligible.

We are delighted to announce that there will be £100 awarded for each prize.

We are now accepting nominations, and each IGA member is entitled to nominate for either or both prizes. Anyone wishing to nominate a book who is not yet an IGA member may join the Association here.

Nominations for the prizes need to be received no later than 23:59 (GMT) on Monday 2nd March 2026.

Nominations for either award should be submitted online here. Please note that self-nominations will not be accepted. Any queries regarding eligibility should be sent to the Chair at j.crawford@exeter.ac.uk.

The Chair for the 2026 prize panel is Professor Joseph Crawford (University of Exeter). A panel of past Presidents and winners will assess the nominations before drawing up a shortlist that will be published on the IGA website. The panel reserves the right not to make an award should no nominated work satisfy the criteria of the Prize.

Nominations may be submitted only by individual members of the IGA, though nominated works do not have to have been published by a member of the Association. Short articles, individual chapters in longer volumes, original fiction and poetry are not eligible, though scholarly (i.e., introduced, annotated and resourced) editions of Gothic texts may be considered.

The panel will advise the serving Co-Presidents of their decision on the winner prior to the IGA conference, which, this year, is hosted at the University of Hull, July 28-31.

The prizes will be presented (or, if a winning author is not present, announced) during the conference.

For the majority of children of my generation, cartoon villainy was the early-years introduction to the Gothic. However, I was, for a long time and no discernable reason, dead against the cinema. My first introduction to the Gothic was therefore not film, but television.

No genre or mode offered more to the fare of animated children’s television in the early noughties than the Gothic. At a time of relative global safety and prosperity, we found ourselves attracted to the safe degeneracy of animated baddies – they gave us a way to act out our desire to push the boundaries with such exaggeration that it posed no threat, real or imagined, and I loved every second of it.

Of the animated series which introduced me to the colourful possibilities of the Gothic, The Care Bears Family (1986-1988) was the first to strike a chord. Its second episode introduces Lord No Heart, the misanthropic wizard who acts as an antagonist throughout the series, and every bit the animated Goth. He even lives in a castle inside a storm cloud!

Is that a little on the nose? Perhaps, but that’s the beauty of children’s Gothic, particularly on television when settings and characters can change week by week. Animation, too, gave this series and others after it limitless possibilities to employ monstrosity and the supernatural to Gothic effect. In short, we can do away with subtlety in favour of dramatic images of isolated castles and dreams of world domination.

My early obsession did not stop there, however. Once I saw how engaging the ‘dark side’ of animated TV could be, I saw it everywhere, from Scooby-Doo (1969 – present) to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1999).

The Gothic witch as a stock figure became a particular source of fascination for my young self. While Sabrina leaned more towards camp as an aesthetic, the Gothic really came into its own in a series which, arguably, is far more camp and ‘cosy’: My Little Pony (1986-1987).

The witch Hydia first appears in the series’ first ten episodes, a powerful woman who transgresses boundaries of this gendered world, in which its protagonists (almost all female) advance a soft-spoken, community-based femininity. Her ultimate goal is to make the world ‘dark and dreary’ to match her home and tastes, turning Hydia from a stock antagonist into a Gothic-inspired shadow in this otherwise pastel-perfect world.

Now, as an early-career researcher in the Gothic, this first introduction to what would become a professional interest has stuck with me. I can trace the writing I am now fascinated by – women’s Gothic and folk and fairy tales, as well as the literature of traditional witchcraft – to the witches and sorcerers and scoundrels of children’s television.

I was no older than five when I came across the Gothic for the first time, but even then, it caught my attention like nothing else. It remains a hugely fruitful field that speaks to a child’s sense of adventure and discovery – and a desire to be a little bit wicked.

We are pleased to share that applications for the role of Secretary to The Allan Lloyd Smith and Justin D. Edwards Memorial Book Prizes has been extended to January 19, 2026.

We can also confirm that the successful applicant will receive a fee of £300.

If you are interested in applying, please send a copy of your CV and a short statement of support to Joseph Crawford at J.Crawford@exeter.ac.uk, CC-ing the International Gothic Association (members@globalgoth.org).

Dear IGA friends,

Sara Wasson here! With enormous love and warmth, I’m posting that this year I need to step aside from being Chair of the IGA Memorial Book Prize Committees in order to pursue some–exciting but very time-consuming!–research commitments this coming spring/summer. The Co-Presidents have kindly suggested a temporary pause, so I hope to return in the 2027-28 round. It was a real honour to chair the prizes in 2024, and I’m wishing absolutely all the best to the incoming Chair, and will be cheering for them when they are announced.

I want to again honour and mention the hard work of the panellists, and indeed the Chair–not just myself but also all those who have gone before: David Punter, Dale Townshend, absolute greats! I also want to honour all the panellists, an extraordinary task–for people on two committees (including the Chair), last time they were reading 30 books, and it meant essentially generously giving up their summer in order to read and celebrate the work of this beautiful community. The panellists are heroes and to be cherished, and I loved working with you all! I hope to work with you in research and writing collaborations in the future.

I was privileged to win the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize twice, and these were two of the most precious and joyful experiences in my whole career. The IGA is not just a scholarly community–it’s a supportive, creative, and warm community. The IGA is an incredibly special organisation. It meant a great deal to have a chance to take the Prize forward.

I am sad to step aside this year but it is for positive reasons, namely research commitments that mean that I would not be able to give the prize the colossal attention it rightly requires.

Update about the Book Prizes Secretary Role

In other good news, the kind Co-Presidents are generously assessing whether some nominal payment may accrue to the Book Secretary role supporting the Chair. I support this wholeheartedly. To facilitate these good plans, the timeline for the secretary hire is being adjusted, and specifics on honorary nominal remuneration and a new deadline will be announced early next year. Applicants who have already sent in CVs can rest assured that their applications have been safely received and will be considered.

Monica, Xavi, Matt, Emily, Bronte, and every panellist, it’s been a pleasure to work with you on the Prizes. The IGA is in great hands! Go bats!

Warmly,

Sara Wasson

The International Gothic Association (IGA) is delighted to invite applications for the role of Secretary to The Allan Lloyd Smith and Justin D. Edwards Memorial Book Prizes. This position provides a unique opportunity for a postgraduate or early-career researcher with a strong interest in Gothic studies to contribute meaningfully to the recognition and celebration of scholarly excellence in our field.

Role Overview

The secretary will assist with the coordination and delivery of the IGA’s Memorial Book Prizes, which are awarded to outstanding publications in Gothic scholarship at the International Gothic Association’s flagship biannual conference. The secretary will administer the nomination, review, and award processes and provide essential support to the Chair of the Prizes, Dr Sara-Patricia Wasson.

The successful applicant will receive a fee of £300.

Key Responsibilities

The secretary will:

• Support the biennial prize cycle, including calls for nominations, processing nominations, and communicating with publishers and nominators to ensure that panelists obtain copies of the nominated works. Additional details are below.
• Support the Chair in developing and testing the nomination form and process (January 2026)
• Process nominations, checking eligibility (e.g. time span of publication and membership status of nominators), emailing confirmations, and assembling and checking a report (Jan-Feb 2026).
• Liaise with publishers and panel members to obtain copies of the works for all panellists, and follow up with publishers pro-actively where books have not yet been received. This work is intensive during March and April, with spikes of activity continuing during May.
• Maintain accurate records and timelines for all prize-related activities.
• Support the Chair’s announcements, publicity, and dissemination of prize results via IGA channels.
• Contribute to the development and refinement of prize procedures and documentation.
• Approximately 5 hours a week average for the five months Jan to May, although those hours will be especially concentrated in mid Jan-mid Feb, and April.

Person Specification

• Postgraduate student or early-career researcher in Gothic studies or a related field (e.g. literature, cultural studies, film, art history).
• A track record of excellent organisational and communication skills.
• Familiarity with Google Sheets and Microsoft Forms.
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple tasks with attention to detail.
• Familiarity with academic publishing and scholarly networks in Gothic studies.
• Commitment to promoting inclusivity and excellence in the field.
• Availability during the February- May time span for more intensive stages in the administrative activity, with particular peaks in February, March and April.

Benefits

• Opportunity to gain professional experience in academic administration.
• Enhanced visibility and networking within the international Gothic studies community.
• Contribution to the recognition of scholarly achievement in a vibrant and evolving field.

If you are interested in applying, please send a copy of your CV and a short statement of support to Joseph Crawford at J.Crawford@exeter.ac.uk, CC-ing the International Gothic Association (members@globalgoth.org), by January 19, 2026.

I must have been around ten years old when I had my first encounter with what was to become a lifelong passion: the Gothic.

I don’t remember much else of that day other than that it was a cold, dark evening and I was home alone. My parents were working late shifts back then and babysitting was not common for kids of my age in my country of origin. On that fateful evening, a new show was about to premiere on national television, and for some reason, I instantly knew it was going to be a special one. Cuddled up under my warm blanket, lights out, and eyes glued to the flickering screen, I entered a world of sublime mystery.

A misty forest of Douglas fir trees unfolded on the screen, the unforgettable sound of Angelo Badalamenti poured out of the loudspeakers, and the most comforting feeling of awe expanded throughout my entire body: “Fire walk with me!” David Lynch’s Twin Peaks thus set the ground for my everlasting love for the Gothic.

As I grew older, I discovered Gothic poetry and fiction. I remember I used to sit for hours in the public library and devour any poem or short story ever written by Edgar Allan Poe. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre became favorites I would get lost in on long summer afternoons. As a teenager, I started writing my own Gothic poetry, at first out of a feeling of personal necessity, then later more intently, as lyrics for rock bands from my hometown. Gothic metal from Paradise Lost or Moonspell became a favorite music genre and my wardrobe slowly turned grey and black.

My years at university opened up new horizons for Gothic literature and cinema. I moved to Germany and majored in British and American Studies. We read Hawthorne, Perkins Gillman, Faulkner and Morrison. The Gothic slowly revealed itself not only as an aesthetic, but also as a platform for exploring social and cultural anxieties. As I finished my PhD and started teaching at university, I knew that the Gothic would have to feature heavily on my course curriculum: US-American Gothic, Southern Gothic, Gothic Cinema, Arctic Gothic. I delve into various aspects of this fascinating mode whenever I get the chance.

Lately, my journey through the Gothic landscape has come full circle, as I explore more and more the intricacies of Gothic film: season one of True Detective, season one of The Terror, or Crimson Peak. And this year has been particularly rewarding, with two exquisite films from my favorite directors: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

A lot has changed in my life since that fateful evening over three decades ago, but one constancy remains. Whenever I cuddle up under the blanket on my couch, lights out, and press play, that same comforting feeling takes over. Because to me, the Gothic has become much more than a hobby. To me, the Gothic feels like home.