Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She specialises in ‘monstrous’ historical fiction, adaptation, and contemporary remix culture, and she is currently interested in the digital afterlives and appropriations of historical archives and ephemera. Her book Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture (Bloomsbury 2020) examines remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how the metaphors of outbreak narratives have infiltrated the way news media, policymakers and the general public view the real world and the people within it. Megen is also an editor of the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an Open Access initiative curated by the Critical Posthumanism Network. Read more about Megen’s work on her blog: frankenfiction.com. 

In this conversation we get into: remix studies, Twilight, mashups, thinking about the public domain as both an unmarked grave but also a place of rebirth, The Secret Garden, China Miéville, which monsters will dominate the future zeitgeist, colonialism via steampunk, the tentacular, and our current undead state.

Gothic Remixed offers a fresh and exciting new take on twenty-first century Gothic. It addresses texts across a range of media that have often been dismissed as parasitic or derivative and champions their significance while remaining alert to their ethical shortcomings. By showing how monstrosity becomes the animating principle of Gothic mashups, hybrid texts and 'Frankenfictions', the book sheds light on emerging forms of Gothic cultural production and provides a cohesive framework for reading the incohesive. De Bruin-Molé is working at the cutting edge of contemporary Gothic and her book will be indispensable for students and scholars with an interest in the field.

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