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Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)
Director of the International Crime Fiction Association and Co-Editor of Crime Fiction Studies Fiona Peters is a Professor in Crime Fiction at Bath Spa University in the UK. Her research in the area of crime fiction, including that on the crime writer Patricia Highsmith is internationally recognised. Her 2011 monograph Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith (Ashgate) has been described as ‘the first proper academic study of this underrated author’ and has been adopted as set reading in universities across the United States. Subsequently, Prof. Peters was invited to guest edit a volume of the prestigious ‘Clues’ journal, ‘Patricia Highsmith: A Re-evaluation’, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Highsmith’s death. This volume was published in November 2015. Since then she has been a keynote at several international conferences, established the International Crime Fiction Association (from 2017) and the Captivating Criminality conferences (from 2014) and published widely in the are of crime fiction. In 2019 she established the Edinburgh University Press journal Crime Fiction Studies of which she is editor. Her other research interests include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Evil Studies and Gender Studies. She is currently working on a monograph with Routledge, Collective Obsession: Representations of Evil in True Crime Narratives, and Crime Fiction: An Introduction (EUP). |
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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. |
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Linda Ledford-Miller (Professor Emerita of the University of Scranton)
Coordinator of Annual Book Prize and Reviews Editor Dr. Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavours. She continues to work across cultures and continents according to where her interests take her. She has published widely on Travel Writing and American Minority writers. Her recent work focuses on Crime Fiction, including Robert Downey Jr.’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, gender roles in the In Death series by the American J.D. Robb, the village mysteries of the Canadian Louise Penny, the philosophical Inspector Espinosa series by the Brazilian Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and the stand alone crime novel by the Mexican Laura Esquivel, best known for the smashing success of her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989). |
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Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University)
Coordinator of Annual Book Prize Ruth Heholt is Associate Professor of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University. Her research interests focus around crime, the Gothic, gender, Victorian, and Cornish studies. She is author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics (Routledge, 2020) and co-author of Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction (Anthem Press, 2022). She is co-editor of several collections: Gothic Animals (2018), Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018), The Victorian Male Body (2018), and Haunted Landscapes (2017). She has organised international conferences including Folk Horror in the Twentieth Century (Falmouth and Lehigh Universities 2019) and is editor of the peer reviewed journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural. |
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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. |
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Keli Masten (Ferris State University)
Association Blog Editor Keli Masten is an instructor of Composition and Literature at Ferris State University after finishing her PhD in English from Western Michigan University in 2019. Her dissertation, Called Forth by Imminent Dangers: The American Gothic in Mysteries of Detection and Detective Fiction (1799-1929) is a radical reconsideration of generic development, arguing that American detective fiction grows out of the gothic tradition. Her article “Cherchez la Femme: A Good Woman’s Place in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction” is also a reframing effort, displacing the attention paid to the femme fatale and instead focusing upon the femme fiable, the dependable female sidekick, in Hammett and Chandler (Clues: A Journal of Detection 2018). Other writing projects include violence as social commentary, gendered social norms, and resurrecting the forgotten work of American author, Anna Katharine Green. |
