Goth History & Literature

Convergence 27

August 8 – 11, 2025

Room B (Silverplume) | Saturday | 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Why does darkness fascinate us? This panel explores the origins and evolution of gothic literature and culture – from haunted castles and romantic tragedy to modern tales of horror and beauty. Join us as we trace how goth themes have shaped stories, inspired generations, and continue to cast their long shadow today.

Panelists

Thora Brylowe

Thora Brylowe works at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches Romantic-era literature, science fiction, and the history of print and illustration. She’s director of the scholarly website Romantic Circles. When she’s not creepily fondling old books, she likes to dance and pet cats.

Billy J. Stratton

Billy J. Stratton operates at the intersection of the classroom and counter-culture. A lifelong punk and industrial fan, his work dives deep into the things that scare, provoke, and define us. By day, he’s a University of Denver professor teaching Native American literature and genre film studies (think horror, monsters and slashers and sci-fi, posthumanism, i.e., killer robots and AI like HAL and Cyberdyne Systems). By night, he’s a critic and author, with work featured in TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hollywood Progressive. He’s written books on colonial warfare and the evolution of Indigenous horror and also crafts his own unsettling neo-southern gothic fiction.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University, the Los Angeles Review of Books associate editor in charge of horror, the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Gothic Studies Forum.

He is the author or editor of 33 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and pop culture. Among his book publications are The Routledge Introduction to the American Ghost Story (co-authored with Scott Brewster), Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (Fordham University Press), Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (Co-edited with Regina Hansen, Fordham University Press), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press), The Age of Lovecraft (Co-edited with Carl Sederholm, University of Minnesota Press), The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (Wallflower Press), Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (Fordham University Press), and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Wallflower Press).