Meet the ECR/PGR Council

Stephanie Sumner (University of Potsdam)
Coordinator of the ICFA's ECR/PGR Council

Stephanie is currently writing her PhD thesis on “The Sidekick and the Middle Classes
in British Detective Fiction between 1880 and 1945” (working title). She holds a BA in Business
Administration and English from the University of Duisburg-Essen and an MA degree in
Anglophone Literatures and Cultures from the University of Potsdam. She is currently working
for the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at her alma mater with a focus on strategies of career
orientation for students of the Humanities, while also further developing the faculty’s orientation
programme and study entry phase. Her research interests include the sidekick in classic British detective fiction, nineteenth-century British (crime and detective) fiction, as well as the (detective’s) sidekick in modern TV adaptations.

Within the ECR Council, Steph is responsible for organising writing nights, workshops, research symposia, as well as other networking events. She also manages the ECR/PGR Discord.

Lara Brändle (University of Oslo)
Content Creator - ICFA Social Media

Lara is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway, writing her dissertation on motherhood in neo-Victorian literature. In 2023, she has graduated with an MA in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg. Since 2021, Lara has been a part of the social media team of the International Crime Fiction Association (ICFA), since 2023 she is an editor of the ICFA Newsletter, and most recently she has become part of the newly established ECR council. Her first publication about Gothic doubles in Laura Purcell’s The Corset appeared in Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 2024). Beyond neo-Victorian fiction, she is also interested in Victorian fiction, transgressions in crime fiction, as well as contemporary queer literature.

Benjamin Parris (University of St Andrews)

Benjamin is a doctoral candidate at the University of St Andrews. His research interests lie in the intersection between popular fiction, socio-politics, cultural memory, and the publishing industry – specifically within British interwar detective fiction. His work aims to destabilise popular conceptions of genre and Englishness through close reading and an emphasis on literary production, dissecting the canon to bring forgotten authors – such as John Dickson Carr and Anthony Berkeley Cox – to the fore. He is also a reviewer, interviewer, and bookseller.

Emily Farmer (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Associate Editor for Crime Fiction Studies, Social Media Coordinator, and ICFA Website Manager

Emily completed her Masters degree in Crime and Gothic Fictions at Bath Spa University in 2021. Her final project concerned the portrayal of relationships between women and girls in the crime fiction of Japanese writer Kirino Natsuo. Accordingly, Emily is primarily interested in the interactions between gender and crime fictions, particularly the representations of female criminality. This area of research interest also extends to the portrayal of women victims and victim-survivors in true-crime texts, and how they have traditionally been silenced in favour of their murderers.

Emily is currently a PhD student at Hong Kong Baptist University in their English department, researching expressions of civilised violence between the underdogs of contemporary nordic noir fiction. Her research will take an interdisciplinary approach, calling on gender studies, violence scholarship, socio-cultural factors, and crime fiction criticism to achieve her research project.

As the Social Media Coordinator for the International Crime Fiction Association Emily participates in content creation as well as managing the social media team and the Association's website. Emily also assists Professor Fiona Peters, Dr. Stewart King and Dr. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein with editing Crime Fiction Studies.

Felicitas Mayer (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

Felicitas is a PhD student at the LMU in Munich, Germany. Her dissertation explores the role of servant figures and their relationship to the family in English crime fiction from the 1920s to the 1960s, considering works by Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Margery Allingham, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Georgette Heyer. Her other research interests include Victorian (crime) fiction, mid-twentieth-century middlebrow fiction and Irish literature of the late twentieth and twenty-first century.

Previously, she obtained her BA in English and philosophy at the LMU and graduated with an MA in English literature, language and culture from Freie Universität Berlin where she wrote her thesis on the implications of activities of reading and writing in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane novels.

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg)
Co-Editor and Reviews Editor for Crime Fiction Studies

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a research assistant and post-doc at the Department of
English Literature at the University of Bamberg and co-editor of Crime Fiction
Studies. Her research interest in Crime Fiction lies in English Golden Age detective
fiction and late 19th-century crime writing with a focus on gender representation.
Among other topics, she has worked on Gothic and (political) Gothic parody of the
long eighteenth century, trauma in the poetry of the Great War, and socio-political
criticism in Star Trek fanfiction, and is currently working on her post-doc project on
masculinities and femininities in Golden Age Crime Fiction. Her PhD dissertation,
Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody: Framing the Subversive Heroine, focused
on the topic of female normatisation in the Gothic novel versus the Gothic parody.
Her latest books, Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality: New
Directions in Gothic Studies co-edited with Sarah Faber (Routledge) and Crime
Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities: Proceedings of the Eighth Captivating
Criminality Conference appeared in March 2024. She is currently working on a
Routledge edited collection on Teaching Gothic Literature Now.

After discovering the Captivating Criminality conferences a few years ago and joining the ICFA, Kerstin has eagerly embraced the chance of writing her postdoc project on crime fiction. She has since worked on the representation of gender roles in Golden Age and neo-Golden Age crime fiction. The topic of the 2021 Bamberg conference, Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities, was a direct result of her fascination with the topic of gender in crime fiction.

In 2021, Kerstin joined Crime Fiction Studies as an assistant editor and became full editor in 2024. Together with Linda Ledford-Miller, she also runs the book review team. In the same year, she became a member of the ICFA book prize jury. She is also part of the newsletter team and the ECR/PGR team and organised Captivating Criminality 8 and will organise Captivating Criminality 13 (2026) in Bamberg, Germany.

Kristina Alexandra Steiner
ICFA Newsletter Writer

Kristina is an MA student of English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg. She obtained her BA in English, Communication Studies and Business Administration from the same university. She works at the department of Communication Studies as a student assistant and is currently writing her MA thesis on representations of childhood, trauma, and narratology in twentieth-century children’s fiction about WW2. Beyond children’s literature, she is also interested in Victorian detective fiction, Sensation fiction as well as their intersections with press history. Her previous projects have been dedicated to the development of the Victorian popular press, focusing on newspaper crime reporting and its impact on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crime fiction.

At Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (2021) in Bamberg, Kristina was headed up the design team and contributed an academic poster.

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