INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION ASSOCIATION
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About The association

​Established in 2017 by Professor Fiona Peters, the association now has over 500 members, with that number growing each year. The highly anticipated Captivating Criminality conferences have been running since 2014 worldwide and have led to the release of Crime Fiction Studies, an innovative new journal published with Edinburgh University Press and the first of its kind in the UK.
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Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)
Director of the International Crime Fiction Association

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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Stewart King (Monash University)
Co-Editor

Stewart King is an associate professor in Spanish and Catalan Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Stewart has made major contributions to the field of crime fiction, most notably in the area of crime fiction as world literature, in which he has published several articles and book chapters. Stewart is currently working on a book-length study of world crime fiction. Notable works by Stewart include Detective Fiction from Spain: Murder in the Multinational State, Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility (co-edited with Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls), and The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (co-edited with Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal and Andrew Pepper). 

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Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg)
Assistant Editor and Reviews Editor

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is an assistant researcher and lecturer at the Department of English Literature at the University of Bamberg where she also finished her PhD on Gothic Parodies of the long 18th century in 2018. Her dissertation, Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody. Framing the Subversive Heroine (Routledge 2022), traces the relationship of genre, reception and frames in the Gothic parodies of the first wave of Gothic, focusing on socio-political subversion and the heroine. Besides her research in the Gothic, she has published on the poetry of the Great War and on socio-political discourses in Star Trek: Discovery fanfiction.

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 is now working 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, is a direct result of her fascination with the topic of gender in crime fiction.
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Since 2021, Kerstin has been an assistant editor of Crime Fiction Studies and works on the book review team. Kerstin is a member of the ICFA book prize jury, replacing Eric Sandberg from the 2021 prize onwards. 

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Linda Ledford-Miller (Professor Emerita of the University of Scranton)
Coordinator of Annual Book Prize and Reviews Editor
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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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​Kirsten T. Saxton (Mills College)
Reviews Editor 

​Kirsten T. Saxton is Professor of English and Director of the MA in English Literature at Mills College in Oakland California. Her scholarship focuses on authors and genres whose contributions to the literary landscape have been obscured or repressed; she has published widely on 18th-century literature and culture, early British women writers, and crime and popular fictions as well as serving on a variety of editorial positions and boards, including being on the book review team for Crime Fiction Studies.

All of her research explores intellectual connections between emergent theories and historical narratives to build a more expansive understanding of the past that changes our understanding of our present and invites us to imagine alternative, more just futures.  

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Emily Farmer (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Social Media Coordinator & PGR / ECR Support Officer


​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 will soon be joining Hong Kong Baptist University as a PhD candidate in their English department, researching horizontal violence between girls and women in twenty-first-century female-led crime 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. Emily also supports Ciara with her work for the Early Career Researchers' Hub.

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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. 

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Ciara Gorman (Queen's University Belfast/Maynooth University)
PGR/ECR Officer

Ciara Gorman recently defended her PhD on 'Representations of Female Criminality in Twenty-First-Century French Crime Fiction' at Queen's University Belfast. Her research was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Northern Bridge Consortium, and is interdisciplinary in nature, grounded in French cultural studies, crime fiction studies, gender and feminism studies, sociology and criminology. Her most recent publication is 'Good Housekeeping: Domestic Noir and Domestic Work in Leïla Slimani's Chanson douce', a contribution to the edited volume Taking Up Space: Women at Work in Contemporary France (edited by Siham Bouamer and Sonja Stojanovic). ​Her doctoral thesis examined female criminal characters in the work of Pierre Lemaitre, Fred Vargas, Leïla Slimani and Hannelore Cayre. 


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Greta Nachajova
Content Creator - ICFA Social Media

Although Greta’s professional journey in the crime-related field has begun by entering the
University of Finance and Administration in Prague, she was interested in the subject well
before. Greta’s final thesis consisted of her long-term research on child police interrogation.
At present, she is a part of multiple organizations where she continues with her research in
criminology as a scientific discipline connected to psychology and the world of crime fiction.


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Lara Elisabeth Brändle
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Content Creator - ICFA Social Media

Lara is a student at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg finishing her Master's degree in English and American Studies. Her thesis deals with women who kill in Victorian fiction and in how far their transgression is contextualised as madness in different modes, thus allowing it to be read as more or less critical of contemporary gender norms. She has been involved with the ICFA since volunteering as a student helper for Captivating Criminality 8 in Bamberg in 2022. After finishing her Master’s degree, Lara wants to pursue a PhD in English Literature investigating the construction of motherhood and femininity in twenty-first-century Neo-Victorian novels.


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Kristina Alexandra Steiner
ICFA Newsletter Writer

Kristina Steiner 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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  • Home
  • Meet the Team
    • Contact
  • Blog
  • Journal
  • Conferences
    • Captivating Criminality 11
    • Past Conferences >
      • 2023 Conference (Aug-Sept)
      • 2023 Conference (March)
      • 2022 Conference
      • 2021 Online November Event
      • 2020 Conference
      • 2019 Conference
      • 2018 Conference
      • 2017 Conference
      • 2016 Conferences
      • 2015 Conference
  • Book Prize
    • 2022 Prize
    • 2021 Prize
    • 2020 Prize
    • 2019 Prize
    • 2018 Prize
  • PGR/ECR Network