Crimeculture.com, established in Summer 2002,
is an academic internet site that we hope will have something to
offer anyone teaching or studying crime fiction, film and graphic
art. Recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of university
courses being offered on crime-related topics. We have launched our
site because we hope it will be an exciting context for bringing together
people involved in the study of popular culture and hope it will provide
encouragement for students who would like the chance to share their
work in an international forum.
Our
aims are:
* To explore different
critical approaches to the study of crime literature/film, and to
be as entertaining and wide-ranging as possible. In addition to fiction
and film, we will cover, for example, TV crime series, true crime
writing, vintage crime paperback art work, graphic novels and video
games: please see our Crime
Fiction, Crime
Film and True Crime sections.
* To provide an opportunity
for the best undergraduate and postgraduate students to publish things
online, whether first-rate term-time essays or things written specially
for the site: please see our Articles
section.
* To publicize the crime literature/film
courses being offered at American, British, Canadian and Australian
universities and to provide a discussion forum for those involved
in teaching these courses: please see our Courses
section.
* To establish links with
the people who run the best crime-related web sites: our Links
section will provide an up-to-date, annotated list of the most exciting
and useful sites.
* To provide an extensive
bibliography of books and articles: please see our Reading
Lists section, which will also advertise new and forthcoming books
on crime-related topics.
Crimeculture's
editorial team now includes both literature and film specialists working
in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia:
The site was created in 2002
by Lee and Katharine Horsley. Lee is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster
University and runs two courses on crime literature and film.
Katharine, an Early Modernist who completed her doctoral work at Harvard
University in 2004, has recently introduced to the site a major new section called Rogue's Gallery, on the early literature of crime. Together or separately Lee and Katharine have published/are preparing
for publication several articles and books on crime fiction, including
The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001) and Twentieth-Century
Crime Fiction (forthcoming from OUP, August 2005; supported by an AHRB Research
Leave Award in the academic year 2003-04) and The Appearance of Guilt: Fashioning Criminality in Late Medieval England. Lee's e-mail address is leehorsley@mac.com and Katharine's is khorsley@post.harvard.edu.
Our Classic Detective
Fiction and Cyberpunk editor is Stacy Gillis, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Stacy is co-editor of a collection on detective fiction, The Devil
Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film (2001), and is
preparing for publication a book entitled Detecting Fictions:
Resistance and Resolution in Golden Age Detective Fiction; her articles include "The (Post)Feminist Politics of Cyberpunk." in Gothic Studies 2007 and "Cyber Noir: Cyberspace, (Post)Feminism and the Femme Fatale" in Stacy Gillis, ed. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005.
Her own web page can be found at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/staff/profile/stacy.gillis and her e-mail address is stacy.gillis@ncl.ac.uk.
Christopher Pittard is the editor
of our Victorian Detective Fiction section. Christopher, who
is writing his PhD on late Victorian/Edwardian detective fiction,
is a member of the postgraduate faculty in the School of English,
University of Exeter. His
e-mail address is C.A.Pittard@exeter.ac.uk.
Our Graphic Crime Fiction section is edited by Arthur M. Fried, an associate professor of English and department chair at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, where he teaches courses in film and popular fiction. He has a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan, masters degrees in journalism and popular fiction/media arts, and a certificate in distance education. Arthur brings to Crimeculture his specialist knowledge of graphic novels and comic books – an expertise founded on over fifty years of reading them. Arthur can be reached at: afried@plymouth.edu
Our True Crime editor is Vicky Munro, an American Studies specialist at the University of Minnesota. Vicky's PhD dissertation covered true crime books, newspaper/magazine treatments of crime, television shows and political rhetoric. Her e-mail address is munro001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
The Crimeculture editorial team has recently been joined by Sue Neale (Oxford Brookes University). Sue completed her BA in French studies at Oxford Brookes in 2003, having arrived there via the Open University. Having studied a variety of literature, she chose to concentrate on Daniel Pennac and his Malaussène saga which plays with the crime fiction genre, inverting stereotypes, poking fun at French society in general while being very entertaining. Sue decided that she wanted to take her interest in French crime fiction further and is working on an MA by research, which she will complete in January 2006. She has always been interested in thrillers, and particularly crime fiction (though being born with a name like S Holmes she wonders if this is destiny rather than coincidence). She recalls reading Simenon (in English) as a child of 12 with chicken pox - and has never looked back. She remains fascinated by the variations of the genre coming from Europe and looks forward to being able to read more once she has written her dissertation. Sue can be reached at: sue@nealedesign.freeserve.co.uk
We have now been joined as well by Neddal Ayad, who will be involved particularly with the 21st-century crime section of the site. Neddal graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador with a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature and Anthropology. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland under a large pile of books, guitars, and compact discs. He likes his noir weird. And bleak. The weirder and more bleak the better.
We will soon be joined by Carole Barrowman,
who will be specialising in African-American crime fiction. Born and
raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Carole is an Associate Professor of English
at Alverno College in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, where, among other things literary, she teaches a course
on the art of the mystery. Carole
has published numerous academic articles, including “Improving
Teaching and Learning Effectiveness by Defining Expectations”
in Preparing Competent College Graduates for Josey-Bass, as well as
a number of reviews and essays, including “The Black Tradition
in Mysteries,” in Midwesterner Magazine. Carole is
also on the Editorial Board for the Journal of General Education,
and she served as the Local Arrangements Chair for Bouchercon 30,
the World Mystery Writers Conference. Carole has just completed writing
her own mystery set in Washington D.C. during the Civil War with Clara
Barton as the amateur detective. The manuscript is currently being
handled by The Jane Chelius Literary Agency in New York. Carole can
reached at Carole.Barrowman@alverno.edu
Crimeculture's literature specialists
have recently been joined by two crime film specialists:
Philippa Gates, who will be one of our
film section editors, is an Assistant Professor in Film Studies at
Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.
Her main research interest is masculinity in the Hollywood detective
film—classical and contemporary. Philippa is the co-editor of
The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film
(Greenwood 2002) and her most recent article is “Always a Partner
in Crime: Black Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film”
(The Journal of Popular Film and Television 2004). At the
moment she is preparing a book for publication on contemporary Hollywood
detective films entitled Crisis and Crime: Investigating Masculinity
and the Hollywood Detective Film. Philippa's e-mail address
is pgates0717@yahoo.ca.
Another recent addition to our editorial
team is Roger Westcombe, the founding President of the
Big House Film Society, which specialises in film noir
and classic thrillers. He has designed and presented specialist seminars
on a variety of topics including ‘Teaching film noir ‘at
the 2002 international CAMEO (Council of Australian Media Educators
Organisation) conference, Joining The Dots. In 2003 he presents
the first of an annual series of introductory film noir seminars
for students, Pulp Diction. He is a graduate of the B.A.
(Communications) program at the University of Technology, Sydney (1990).
Roger's e-mail address is bighousefilm@yahoo.com.
The main sections
of the site are:
