dramyhsturgis:
Registration for RRIII: The Expanding Universe is now officially OPEN! Join now to attend this three day digital conference May 4-6, 2023 for social events (cosplay reception), panels, brilliant keynotes, and all things Star Wars!
Realizing Resistance Episode III Tickets | Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative
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Song: “Graveyard Blues”
Quote:
I got up this morning, With the blues all around my bed. I got up this morning, With blues all around my bed. I had a dream last night The one that I loved was dead.
Read the complete lyrics.
Listen to the performance of Roscoe Holcomb…
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October 9: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (2018)
Quote:
Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.
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My latest “Looking Back on Genre History segment is up on the newest episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, and it focuses on Dark Academia!
You can hear it here.
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October 13: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas (2020)
Quote:
You are here. You are in. And doesn’t it feel good? You are in the house and the house is in the woods. You are in the house and the house is in you.
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My two-part plan to fill the time between the end of Picard and the start of the new season of Strange New Worlds is going very well. Cheers for Una McCormack, John Jackson Miller, and Star Trek.
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Dark Academia novel: All These Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth (2018)
Quote:
There was a story on campus about a student who had died many years ago—so long ago that no one remembered anymore what his name was or how he had died exactly, but there were reports every now and again of a sighting of his ghost. Some said he’d hanged himself in the showers of the senior boys’ dormitory over a broken heart; others said he’d overdosed on pills and fallen into an eternal slumber in his dorm bed over a failing exam grade. It was bad luck if you saw him, a harbinger of terrible things to come. Bryce Langston had reported seeing the ghost on his way home from the library one night. The next morning, he got a rejection letter from Harvard. Everyone had thought he would be a shoo-in, and he hadn’t even gotten on the waiting list. The next year, Amanda King supposedly saw the ghost right before she got in a fatal car accident. I always thought about the ghost when I was walking around campus at night by myself. I imagined seeing a white smear in the corner of my vision, but every time I turned my head, there was nothing there.
ALT
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Dark Academia novel: Fraternity by Andy Mientus (2022)
From the cover:
Be careful what you pledge.
Quote:
How to make a Perfect Storm:
1. Allow terrible, unholy powers to find their way into the hands of children. See that those children only half-translate their conjurations, missing key protective details.
2. Have them perform those conjurations at the very height of autumn, the dying of the year, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest. Make sure they are coming to the work not soberly but at an emotional breaking point, dripping blood, hungry for violence. Aim their violence at another child.
3. Pray for those children.
Terrible consequences await them.
ALT
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It was a delight to join Emily Strand, with whom I co-edited the anthologies Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier and Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away (both 2023 from Vernon Press), to talk Star Trek and Star Wars with the Dice in Mind podcast. Dice in Mind is a podcast hosted by Brad Browne and Jason Kaufman that explores the intersection of life, games, science, music, philosophy, and creativity through interviews with leading creatives.
Episode 106: Drs. Amy Sturgis and Emily Strand | Dice in Mind
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On November 18, 1897, junior student Bertha Lane Mellish vanished from Mount Holyoke College. Her disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.
I’m currently working on a book project that involves the Mellish case. Today it feels especially important to say her name.
Note: If anyone would like a (very brief!) peek into my current book project, here is a video of my presentation “Missing Students and Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia.“ I gave this talk earlier this year at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture” conference.
ALT
ALT
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Dark Academia novel: The Other Lives of Miss Emily White by A. J. Elwood (2023)
Quote:
It’s a ghost… a ghost of her.
I saw her again, standing in the entrance hall, dripping to the parquet; her hair a damp rope, her face pale, her eyes cast into darkness. I pushed my blanket away as if it were a shroud, smothering and heavy, weighting me into a grave. I felt cold right through. Emily was young and vibrant and alive. She was here. She’d touched my arm. She’d smiled at me and I had lived in that smile, just for a time. She couldn’t simply stop, couldn’t vanish…
I peered into the corners of the room, where the shadows lay deepest. I half expected a figure to be standing there, darkness spooling from its heart, like paint spiralling from a brush in a jar of water. I fervently wished it away.
ALT
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Back to the Future Is Female!
I am looking forward to this online event at 6pm Eastern on March 14, 2023!
From Pulp Era pioneers to the radical innovators of the 1960s and ’70s, visionary women writers have been a transformative force in American science fiction. For Women’s History Month, acclaimed SF authors Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Pamela Sargent, and Sheree Renée Thomas join Lisa Yaszek, editor of LOA’s The Future Is Female!, for a conversation about the writers who smashed the genre’s gender barrier to create worlds and works that remain revolutionary.
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Some of the university and conference talks I gave this year are now online.
Why You Should Read The Last Man by Mary Shelley
Why You Should Read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
“A Fortnight in the Wilderness” with Alexis de Tocqueville
“Missing Students & Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia" (presented at the Popular Culture Research Network’s “Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture” conference).
View this presentation here.
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STAR WARS, HARRY POTTER, and More in the World of Academia
It me!
I was delighted to be interviewed about my undergraduate and graduate classes for this article in Nerdist.
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Song: “Witches of Harlan”
Quote:
I’ve heard the stories since I was a kid: Witches of Harlan haunt Black Mountain Ridge. Some say at midnight they roam the mountainside Searching for anybody that isn’t safe inside.
No, I hear ‘em whisper in the pines, I hear 'em calling to me To come on outside.
Read the complete lyrics.
Listen to the performance of Breaking Grass…
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Song: “Knoxville Boy”
Quote:
When the moon is high the Knoxville boy Goes prowling out to kill. We don’t know why so many die To give that boy a thrill. A handsome lad with a wealthy dad And eyes of bluebird blue, He’s killed before, he’ll kill some more, And the next one could be you.
When the fog rolls into Knoxville And the river’s on the rise, Don’t go near the Knoxville boy There’s murder in his eyes.
Listen to Larry Stephenson’s performance…
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October 5: Grey Land Duology by Peadar Ó Guilín (2016-2018)
Quote from The Call (2016):
“Oh, they mean to do more than kill you, child. They want to twist you. To crumple you up like an old sheet of paper.”
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Website: http://amyhsturgis.com
Mastodon: http://universeodon.com/@drahsturgis
Twitter: http://twitter.com/drahsturgis
Dreamwidth: http://eldritchhobbit.dreamwidth.org
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On my latest “Looking Back at Genre History” segment on the StarShipSofa podcast (Episode 748), I revisit the brilliant The Twilight Zone series and discuss Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream by David J. Brokaw.
Here is the link!
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I’m excited to share more information about my Fall 2022 online class for Signum University. The course page is coming soon. I’ll be posting links and details!
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