Organising Committee
Dr Reece Goodall
Reece is a Director of Student Experience at the University of Warwick, where he completed a PhD thesis comprising an industrial and theoretical analysis of contemporary French horror cinema. He has previously written for French Screen Studies, Horror Studies and Animation Studies, and is the author of the forthcoming monograph French Horror: Media, industry and culture and the editor of the forthcoming collection Horror Spoofs and Parody: Dying of Laughter.
Dr Hannah Straw
Dr Hannah Straw is an early modern historian specialising on the social, cultural and political history of scandal and identity in the seventeenth century. She was awarded my doctorate from the University of Warwick in 2023, and has since held fellowships at Loughborough University, the Institute of Advanced Research at the University of Warwick, and the Huntington Library. Hannah is currently working at Warwick's Instituted of Advance Study as the Early Career Programme Manager. She coordinates the delivery of the Accolade Programme, building networks of scholars through the Associate Fellowship scheme, and is responsible for building and supporting a university-wide community of postdoc researchers through the IAS.
Lewis Twiby
Lewis specialises in the history of borders, human rights, and movements of marginalised communities. Their current project is looking at state-building and community identity in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua on the the US-Mexico border from 1920 to 1960. Their supervisors for this project are Dr Rosie Doyle and Professor Ben Smith. Their main avenue of research is the history of Mexico, the United States, and Latin America, although I have also looked at colonial and post-independence East Africa. They also write a blog twice a week where they can investigate topics they do not specialise in; this blog covers world history, mythologies and religion, and natural history.
Bethan Davies
Bethan is a Masters student at the University of Warwick, studying Environmental Humanities. Her interests include ecological literature and her dissertation, supervised by Dr Mike Niblett, focuses on the responses to climate change in contemporary fiction. It explores the discussion of climate-induced change in novels from the global core and compares this with fiction from the global peripheries, such as the Caribbean. She is also passionate about widening participation and inclusive representation, teaching ‘No Chairs Shakespeare’ in a local secondary school as a part of the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department’s ‘Performance and Pedagogy’ project.
Iulia Panait
Iulia is a dedicated final-year exchange student at the University of Warwick’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She spent her first two years at Sorbonne Paris IV, focusing on modern French literature, and she is currently broadening her academic pursuits through an intensive Shakespeare course at the University of Birmingham. Deeply passionate and inquisitive, she channels her love of language and literature into her research, with a particular emphasis on linguistics. Looking ahead, she plans to pursue a master’s degree in this field, driven by her commitment to understanding the deeper nuances of communication and cultural expression.
Conference coordinators
Ciara O'Donovan
Lilah Strahan
Anushka Birdavade
Bronwyn Reynolds
Robert Jacob