Fireside Tales of Terror: the Gothic and Winter took place on 15-16 December 2022. The conference was sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre, the ELCS department, and the International Gothic Association. As well as a large number of online audience members who weren’t participating, there were 33 presenting delegates with papers ranging from Romantic period epics, to Victorian short stories, through to video games and film, to fashion and vintage postcards. The two keynote speakers were Dr Derek Johnston (Queen’s University, Belfast) on his work on televisual period drama at Christmas and the Gothic mode, and Dr Monica Germana (University of Westminster) on Boreal Gothic, folklore and travel in winter.  

Our objectives were to bring scholars from around the world together to explore the environmental and affective traditions and departures between the Gothic mode and the winter season across different mediums in the arts and humanities. The conference itself was extremely successful in terms of exploring these topics, and forging new networks and the connections across papers, as well as new and innovative research being showcased.