Bethany Doane is a PhD candidate (ABD) at Penn State University working in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation project, Weird Reading: Horror as Radical Politics at the End of the World, draws on critical theory, feminist studies, and genre literature in order to posit the aesthetic and conceptual significance of weird fiction in the contemporary moment. This interstitial and speculative genre attempts to think toward the unthinkable by imagining what lies beyond human perceptual, epistemic, and phenomenological limits. It therefore engages directly with the conceptual framework of several aspects of the contemporary nonhuman turn. She will defend her dissertation in April, 2019.
Areas of Focus: contemporary literature, feminist and queer theory, film & media studies, philosophies of race, cultural studies, genre fiction, fan studies, horror
Teaching Areas: 20th and 21st C American literature, gender and sexuality studies, women’s/feminist literature, genre fictions, literary theory, feminist science studies, film & media studies, science and literature, rhetoric and composition, literature and the internet, feminist and queer theory, feminist reproduction studies
