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
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.
Journal Articles
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.
Introduction to Death and the Screen. This introductory article to a special issue explores myriad relationships between death and the screen.
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.
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
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
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.
Book Reviews
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
You can access my doctoral thesis here. It examines engagement with death and the dead in what I define as late postmodern culture, arguing for the importance of the arts and humanities in the field of Death Studies and exploring contemporary engagement with death and the dead in the UK and beyond.
In it I 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, theoretical and academic literature (especially the literatures of postmodernism) and contemporary social movements.