Professor Mary Evans

​We are delighted to welcome back Prof. Mary Evans to Captivating Criminality as keynote speaker. Mary is LSE Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute, UK, and has previously taught Women’s Studies and Sociology at the University of Kent. In her sociological research, Prof. Evans looks at the role of narratives in our constructions of meaning and identity in society, and has a particular interest in what we term ‘fiction’ and the role this plays in these constructions. Prof. Evans’s long publications list includes Imagination of Evil. Detective Fiction and the Modern World (2011), a fascinating examination of the relationship between detective fiction (especially the figure of the detective) and the ‘morality’ of real life crime and other social issues, which asks what the figure of ‘the detective’ stands for. Mary is also co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory and her latest publication is entitled The Persistence of Gender Inequality. 

                                                                       Sophie Hannah

​Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 32 languages and 51 territories.  In 2014, with the blessing of Agatha Christie’s family and estate, Sophie published a new Hercule Poirot novel, The Monogram Murders, which was a bestseller in more than fifteen countries.  In September 2016, her second Poirot novel, Closed Casket, was published and became an instant Sunday Times top ten bestseller.
In 2013, Sophie’s novel The Carrier won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards.  Two of her crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012.

         



​                                                               Professor Gill Plain

Gill Plain is Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture at the University of St Andrews. Her publications include Women’s Writing of the Second World War (1996), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001), Ian Rankin's Black and Blue: A Reader's Guide (2002), John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (2006) and Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013). She has also edited collections including A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (2007), Scotland and the First World War (2017) and a special issue of Clues on Scottish crime fiction (2008). She is currently editing Postwar: British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960. As current Head of the School English she is not writing a book; but hopes, when released, to start work on a new monograph exploring narrative reconstructions of masculinity in the aftermath of the Second World War.