When browsing through my academic publications, if there is anything you would like to read but cannot access please contact me for a copy.
Edited Journal Issues
Students on Screen. This issue of the open access academic journal Open Screens was edited with Dr. Kay Calver and features a wide range of writing and audio about the representation of students on screen.
Death and the Screen. This issue of the open access academic and creative journal Revenant is focused on the theme of Death and the Screen. It was edited with Dr. Renske Visser and features a wealth of wonderful work from academics and creatives around the world.
Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture. This issue, co-edited by Dr Devaleena Kundu, myself, and Dr Khyati Tripathi, Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture, a focus issue of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, dives into the factors behind the deeply gendered representations of death and dead bodies in visual culture. In a world dominated by the visual, the female dead body is glamorised and eroticised for consumption.This focus issue examines the various ways one negotiates with visual representations of femininity in death and the intersectional politics at work behind representations frequently divesting the female body of its agency even in death. The issue features scholars from across the globe with contributions exploring subjects such as fetishisation of female corpses, necrophiliac fantasies, spectrality and haunted bodies, feminist necropoetics, gendered deaths and wartime propaganda, and female suicides. The issue invites readers to critically engage with the question of looking and consuming gendered representations of death and dying in visual culture.You can find an accompanying podcast episode here.
Journal Articles
Representations of Students on Screen. This introduction to the journal Special Issue Students on Screen gives an overview of the issue and background on key literature relating to representations of students on screen. The special issue contains 19 contributions in total. This includes a combination of academic articles, book reviews, a roundtable discussion and a podcast episode.
Young Female University Students and the Dark Economy of Higher Education in British Television Dramas Clique (2017) and Cheat (2019). This article explores the conceptualisation of young female university students and the university as an institution in two British television dramas: Clique (BBC, 2017) and Cheat (ITV, 2019). In recent years higher education has been cast in newsmedia and documentary as a ‘dark economy’ with questionable recruitment practices, high stakes assessment, and a profit driven agenda. Students have been problematically positioned both as ‘victims’ of a corrupt and profiteering system and as ‘snowflakes’ incapable of rising to the challenges of higher education. Clique and Cheat engage explicitly with these discourses, and in this article, we analyse how these series serve both to reinforce and undermine a range of social and cultural anxieties about young female students in the cultural space of the university.
Public engagement, pedagogy and edgework in death studies: Ruth Penfold-Mounce in conversation with Bethan Michael-Fox. This interview and discussion offers insights into pedagogy, edgework and public engagement in Death Studies from Professor Ruth Penfold-Mounce. Interdisciplinarity and disciplinary tensions and the development of Death Studies communities are discussed, and Professor Penfold-Mounce provides insights into how she approached her research. Key terminology and concepts from her work are defined, including discussion of ‘glossy topics’, ‘morbid space’, ‘the thanatological imagination’ and ‘social-science fiction.’ The conversation also includes discussion of navigating the challenges of academic careers and contracts for women and for parents.
From Writing to Doing: Strategies for Approaching Loss, Dying and Grief. This Open Access article written with colleagues Professor Gayle Letherby, Dr Tamarin Norwood and Dr Kate Woodthorpe draws on the auto/biographical experiences of four women working in the field of death studies as well as on a range of creative, professional, and academic sources about loss and the process of writing. In the article, we explore creativity, innovation and impact, and the strategies on offer in auto/biographical writing about dying, death, and grief.
Mortality, moral regulation, and (im)moral entrepreneurship in My Favorite Murder. This open access article in the journal Continuum explores issues of representation, gender and morality in the podcast My Favorite Murder. It was written with Dr. Richard Green. It argues that the podcasts functions to produce a collaboratively ‘provocative morbid space’ in which its hosts and audiences can engage in contemplating, discussing, and negotiating the politics of murder, victimhood, and their surrounding inequalities. My Favorite Murder explicitly positions itself as provocative and morally ambiguous, raising questions about who has ownership, legitimacy, and moral standing when it comes to discussing death. We argue that the podcast both reflects public fascination with death and functions to enact a socially progressive agenda through controversial and entertaining popular cultural engagement with the sensitive subject of murder. With the hosts acting as what we term ‘(im)moral entrepreneurs’ collaboratively producing with audiences ‘counter cultural (im)moral discourses’, the commercially successful podcast offers a version of the ‘cautionary tale’ that foregrounds the sociocultural inequalities that have contributed to the vast array of murders discussed across its 300+ existing episodes.
Introduction to Death and the Screen. This introductory article to a special issue explores myriad relationships between death and the screen, and offers a good introduction to key issues of death and its representation for anyone seeking to explore this area.
Death for Young Adult Audiences: Complexity, Complicity and Critique in Pretty Little Liars. This open access article explores how death is represented, negotiated, and framed in the seven season television series Pretty Little Liars, offering insights into some of the complex sociopolitical issues surrounding the representation of death on screen.
Under pressure: representations of student suicide in British documentary television. This article in the journal Mortality was written with Dr. Kay Calver. It examines the representation of student suicide in documentary television. Examining shifting media constructions of the student in popular factual televisual programming, the article argues that student suicide is positioned not only as a profound personal loss, but as an economic loss to a society neglecting its young people.
Breastfeeding Beyond Infancy: An Autoethnographic Dialogue Between Two Women. This open access video and written article was published in Cultivate: The Feminist Journal of the Centre for Women’s Studies. The audiovisual article was written and recorded with Adele Jarrett-Kerr provided a parent-centred interjection into the fraught and moralising discourses that surround breastfeeding, in particular what we term breastfeeding beyond infancy.
Transforming the Community, Transforming the Self: Young People, Social Action and Community Leadership. Published in The Sheffield Student Journal for Sociology, this article was written and developed with Dr. Nikita Hayden from a paper that we presented at the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (MeCCSA) conference in 2014, where it won the best postgraduate student paper prize.
Edited Books
Doing Death ResearchInterviews and Career Reflections with Death Studies Scholars. This book brings together illuminating interviews with the most influential scholars who have shaped the interdisciplinary field of death studies. From sociological explorations to psychological frameworks, cultural analyses to digital age considerations, these conversations reveal the rich tapestry of approaches that have advanced our understanding of mortality, bereavement, and end-of-life experiences. Readers will discover how seminal works in death studies emerged, the critical role of academic and community networks, and the transformative power of examining death through diverse disciplinary lenses. The collection highlights both theoretical developments and practical applications, showcasing how scholars have navigated personal and professional boundaries while contributing to this sensitive yet vital area of study. The volume spans sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, digital humanities, and public engagement, making it an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in death studies, palliative care, counseling, funeral services, and related fields.
Covid-19 and Death StudiesMultidisciplinary Perspectives and Lessons. This book examines the profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on how people experienced dying, death and bereavement from early 2020 onwards. This interdisciplinary collection draws together international examples rooted in empirical research from death studies scholars to make sense of these impacts. The collection includes a wide range of insights from how personal and societal responses to the pandemic shaped the ways people talked and thought about death, to the provision of palliative and intensive care, and changes in funerary practices. The book demonstrates how social responses to the pandemic shaped death in this historical moment and explores potential lasting legacies, such as altered rituals. Curated from articles originally published in the journal Mortality with a new preface by the editors, this collection showcases why death studies is crucial for understanding not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also future pandemics and mass death events.
Palliative Care and Hospice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Over the Decades. This co-edited book created with Professor Erica Borgstrom and Dr. Arnar Arnason offers a comprehensive collection of seminal research into palliative care and hospice, providing an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of end-of-life care, hospice practices, and the care of the dying. Drawing on articles published in Mortality, an academic journal dedicated to the study of death, dying, grief, bereavement, and memorialization, the chapters span a wide range of international and institutional contexts. Together, they demonstrate the breadth and depth of research into end-of-life care practices, experiences, and settings, offering insights into the evolving field of palliative care.
Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and the Past. This collection, edited with Dr. Kate Woodthorpe and Dr. Helen Frisby, combines chapters on process, place and the past to examine the relationships both within and between institutions, institutionalization and death in international contexts. You can hear all about it in this accompanying podcast episode.
Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. This collection, edited with Dr. Sharon Coleclough and Dr. Renske Visser, responds to a growing interest in death, dying and the dead within and beyond the field of death studies. The collection defines an understanding of ‘difficult death’ and examines the differences between death, dying and the dead, as well as exploring the ethical challenges of researching death in mediated form. The book seeks to expand understandings of the difficulty of death in media and culture through a wide range of chapters from different contexts focused on literature, film, television, and in online environments, as well as news reportage. There is also an accompanying podcast episode free to access that can offer you the opportunity to navigate and engage with the book.
There’s More to Fear than Fear Itself: Fears and Anxieties in the 21st Century. This edited collection examines concerns about the ‘other’ and the ‘unknown’ through to anxieties about crime and the apocalyptic and monstrous. Its chapters traverse a contemporary landscape of social, cultural and existential fears, considering: How do fictional narratives in literature, film and television programmes construct and entrench fears and anxieties? What can contemporary fears and anxieties tell us about the changing nature of the world? What is perceived as a threat? And, how do the media shape perceptions of those threats?
Book Chapters
Death, Controversy, and Capitalism: Empathy and Its Deficit in Netflix’s Squid Game. This chapter analyses empathy and the representation of violent death in Squid Game (2021–2025). While navigating the series’ controversial depictions of violence on screen in response to discourses around empathy, the chapter’s primary consideration is Squid Game’s critique of a broader empathy deficit in contemporary culture. To what extent does the series’ controversial representations of violence highlight the potential challenges of experiencing and developing empathy within capitalist systems? This is included in a book entitled Television and Empathy edited by Dr. Michael Samuel and Dr. Theresa Trimmel.
The Future is Ash: Climate Crisis and Human Responsibility in The Fades. This chapter examines the British television drama The Fades – about a group of young people tackling a zombie apocalypse – and how it relates to ideas about climate crisis and human responsibility. Check the book out for more information, or send me an email if you can’t access it and want to read it [an offer that applies to any of the work listed here].
Representations of Immortality and Institutions in 21st-Century Popular Culture. Written with Dr. Devaleena Kundu for this collection on death and institutions, this chapter explores representations of immortality in television comedy drama, documentary and in literature to provide insights into cultural anxieties about mortality, institutions, death, power and privilege. You can hear all about it in this accompanying podcast episode, which gives an overview of the chapter and the whole book.
Exploiting Opportunities and Exposing Inequalities: Telling Covid-19 Stories in Host (2020), Mythic Quest (2020–) and For Life (2020-2021). In this chapter, I examine three visual texts that utilise different strategies for responding to Covid-19. These are the independent horror film Host; comedy television series Mythic Quest, and drama television series For Life. I explore how those involved in creating these narratives for public consumption make the most of the opportunities afforded by the context at the time, and examine the way they respond to the threat of death in their different socio-political contexts.
Mrs Death Misses Death: Death as a Black Woman. In this chapter, my colleague and podcast co-host Renske Visser and I explore the representation of death in Salena Godden’s novel Mrs Death Misses Death. You can hear an interview with Salena about her work on The Death Studies Podcast.
(Un)Dead Together: Hospitality, Hauntology and the ‘Happily Ever After’ in American Horror Story. In this chapter, the first season, Murder House (2011), and fifth season, Hotel (2015),of popular series American Horror Story are examined in terms of their treatment of the (un)dead. The chapter explores how the series can be understood to negotiate the complexities of what it would mean to extend hospitality ‘without reserve’ (Derrida 2005, 6), to choose to live with the (un)dead, and to join them. I argue that in particular for mothers who have suffered the traumatic loss of their children in life, American Horror Story blurs the dystopian and the romantic by offering an eternity of mother/child bonding. Murder House and Hotel both imagine lives where instead of giving up your dead, you get to die (and live) alongside them.
Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss, and the Dead in and on Television. This chapter outlines several conceptual relationships between the medium of television and death and examines how one televisual text – the French supernatural drama Les Revenants (2012-2015) – functions to depict, explore and trouble a range of sociocultural ideas about death, loss, and the dead. For example, concerns expressed in the series about climate death raise ethical questions about the role of media in environmental damage and may trouble audiences whose watching of it indirectly imbricates them in that damage. I was absolutely delighted when Professor Tony Walter reviewed the book this chapter is in for Mortality and stated: ‘Michael-Fox vastly widened my understanding of television and death; I have researched TV portrayals of death, but never considered that television sets’ material existence relies on planned obsolescence and on exploitative working practices leading to suicides in the factories that make them, to be followed by early deaths from excessive sedentary TV viewing. Seeing TV sets and their audiences as mortality-implicated matter, not just as media of communication, was a revelation to me.’
Dark Comedies/Dark Universities: Negotiating the Neoliberal Institution in British Satirical Comedies The History Man (1981), A Very Peculiar Practice (1986–1988), and Campus (2011). In this chapter written with Dr. Kay Calver, we explore how televisual representations can be key mediators of popular understandings of the university and university life. The chapter examines shifting representations of the university, its staff, students and discontents across three televisual satirical comedies, which suggest in their entirety a slow de-politicisation of academics and a deepening marketisation of universities. Find it here in a collection entitled Academia and Higher Learning in Popular Culture edited by Professor Richard Scully and Professor Marcus Harmes.
Sexual Encounters Between the Living and the (Un)Dead in Popular Culture. Written with Matt Coward-Gibbs and published in Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females edited by Rebecca Gibson and James Vanderveen, this chapter examines sexual encounters that take place between the living and the (und)dead in American Horror Story, The Strain and In the Flesh, considering the sociocultural shifts and debates about sexuality and gender they reflect. Want to read it and can’t access it? Contact me.
Constructing the University Student in British Documentary Television. Written with Dr. Kay Calver and published in Reimagining the Higher Education Student: Constructing and Contesting Identities edited by Professor Rachel Brooks and Professor Sarah O’Shea, this chapter examines how university students are conceptualised and represented in recent British documentary television. We consider how televisual representations reflect and negotiate a range of prominent socio-cultural concerns about students and consider how representations are often polarised, with students positioned as either ‘at risk’ and in need of protection or as posing ‘a risk’ to themselves, to other students, and to the university sector. You can read and download the chapter and the whole book for free here.
Dead Chatty: The Rise of the Articulate Undead in Popular Culture. Published in Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead edited by Matt Coward-Gibbs, this chapter offers a critical reading of a range of television narratives centred on diverse populations of the articulate dead, including grim reapers (Dead Like Me), sort-of-ghosts (American Horror Story), zombies (iZombie), what appear to be ‘just regular dead people’ (The Good Place, Les Revenants) and some other creepy and unusual manifestations of the undead (Intruders, The Fades).
The Return of the Dead: Fears and Anxieties Surrounding the Return of the Dead in Late Postmodern Culture. This chapter was written early on in my doctoral study. It explores a range of film and TV where the dead come back, reflecting on shifts in the representation of the dead on screen and exploring what motivates such cultural production and engagement with it.
Social Media, Identity and Democracy. I produced this book chapter early on in my doctoral studies for a collection edited by my principal doctoral supervisor, Professor Alec Charles. I was exploring a range of theory about the presentation of the self and undertaking a leadership programme where I encountered lots of British politicians. In it explore ideas about the relationship between identity and social media use, focusing on UK Members of Parliament.
Roundtables
Representations of students and educational institutions in the Netflix series Adolescence: a roundtable discussion. This open access roundtable discussion explores how adolescence, student identity and educational institutions are framed and positioned in the Netflix series Adolescence. The creators of Adolescence wished to “provoke a conversation” about young people’s experiences in the digital age, male violence and the manosphere. In this roundtable discussion, six UK based educators reflect on the series and engage in a critical discussion regarding its representations of students on screen.
Playing Dead: Death, Games and Popular Culture. Manchester Games Studies Network. In this roundtable, I discuss televisual representations of death and how they can enable discussions about mortality. Available here.
Book Reviews
A review of Death/Television by Professor Helen Wheatley can be found here.
A review of Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverley. Read it here.
A review of Death in Contemporary Popular Culture edited by Dr. Adriana Teodorescu and Professor Michael Hviid Jacobsen. Read it for free here.
A review of HEAR ME… Voices from a Care Home during the Covid 19 Pandemic by Anna Mankee-Williams and Professor Ruth Heholt, published Open Access and free to read and download here.
A review of Man-Eating Monsters: Anthropocentrism and Popular Culture edited by Professor Dina Khapaeva, published Open Access and free to read and download here.
What do you want? An extended, reflective review of Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism by Dr. Mareile Pfannebecker and Dr. J. A. Smith in New Formations. Read it Open Access to read and download for free here.
A review of Death, the Dead and Popular Culture by Dr. Ruth Penfold-Mounce, published in Mortality. Read it here.
Thesis
My doctoral thesis examines engagement with death and the dead in what I define as late postmodern culture, exploring contemporary engagement with death and the dead in the UK and beyond and arguing for the importance of the arts and humanities in the field of Death Studies.
focus primarily on literary memoir (Julian Barnes, Jenny Diski, Will Self) and television (Les Revenants, The Fades, In the Flesh). I also examine a range of other examples of engagement with death in British art, US and UK journalism, charitable initiatives, social media, theoretical and academic literature (especially the literatures of postmodernism) and contemporary social movements. You can find a copy in the publications list here.