Joanne Ella Parsons
Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Falmouth University
Dr Jo Parsons specialises in popular literature and culture from the Victorian period to the present day. Her current focus is in the area of Erotica and Romantic Fictions, and she is a recognised expert on the Bonkbuster and the works of Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran, and Judith Krantz in particular. She is also undertaking a part-time secondment in Falmouth University’s Centre for Blended Realities where she is completing a funded creative and critical project on sex, intimacy, pleasure, and haptic technologies.
She is editor of Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love (British Library 2024). She is co-editor and one of the authors featured in the creative anthology, 13 Cornish Ghost Stories (Mabecron, 2024), which won the 2025 Holyer an Gof general fiction prize, and co-editor of several academic edited collections including Ghosts and the Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2025); Women Writing Men: 1689-1869 (Routledge, 2022); and The Victorian Male Body (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
She has also published several journal special issues, journal articles, and book chapters. Jo is co-editor of three academic book series: Studies in Romance, Power, and Desire (University of Wales Press; and Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture and Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures (Edinburgh University Press).
Kirsten T. Saxton
Professor of English
Northeastern University at Mills
k.saxton@northeastern.edu
Kirsten T. Saxton (she/her) is a cultural studies and feminist scholar of 18th-century literature, with a focus on authors and genres whose contributions to the literary landscape have been obscured or repressed. Her work 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.
Her interest in collaborative research, place-based situated knowledge, and digital humanities informs all of her work. In addition, her commitment to collaborative research, situated knowledge, and humanities for the public good underpins her role as the PI for the $500,000 Mellon Public Humanities-funded program, “We Are the Voices We Have Been Waiting For: Poetry, Performance, and Public Humanities,” a project which offers new approaches to place-based community, scholarship, and social justice.
Her current research emphasizes the ways in which reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts (broadly understood) through anti-racist, feminist, queer, and crip theoretical positions offers us productive ways to understand not only historical contexts, but also our own cultural moment. Her scholarship explicitly engages with and participates in #BIPOC18, #Bigger6, and V21 Collective communities who are committed to anti-racist, progressive scholarship.
Jennifer Schnabel
Jennifer Schnabel | Ohio State University Libraries
Jennifer Schnabel is an associate professor and English librarian at Ohio State University. Her scholarship focuses on women and crime fiction. She has published on the writer Ruth Rendell and recently co-edited a collection Reassessing Murder, She Wrote: The Afterlives of a Popular Culture Phenomenon (Routledge).
Jennifer Schnabel, M.A., M.L.I.S., is associate professor and English Librarian at The Ohio State University in the USA. She provides research and teaching support to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in the Department of English and is the library liaison to the film studies program and the Department of Linguistics.
She has co-led several OSU study abroad courses in London focused on experiential learning and primary source research. In addition to her scholarship on graduate student research support, research partnerships, and early career researcher education about the scholarly publishing process, her research agenda is focused on women and crime fiction, and she is currently developing a project about crime fiction and archival material.
She has published on the crime fiction writer Ruth Rendell and recently co-edited the Reassessing Murder, She Wrote: The Afterlives of a Popular Culture Phenomenon, a critical overview of the cultural impact of the television series. She regularly publishes scholarly book reviews in the Clues and Crime Fiction Studies journals. Jennifer is the research support Officer for the International Crime Fiction Association, and a former co-chair of the Mystery and Detective Fiction area of the Popular Culture Association.