Are werewolves for real?  Two authors who have researched and written about the creatures will discuss them in a Halloween Eve lecture and you are all invited to attend!

Dr. Alexis Easley and Shannon Scott will read from their anthology, Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838-1896, from 2 to 3:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 30 in Room 108 in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library.  This lecture is free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served and copies of the anthology will be available for sale and signing following the reading.  The anthology features vividly written stories, some taken from the pages of rare 19th century periodicals.

 Alexis Easley is an Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Her first book, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, was published by Ashgate in 2004.   Her second book, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, was published by Delaware UP in 2011.    She is a scholar of Victorian journalism and last year became editor of Victorian Periodicals Review, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.  

Her most recent publications appeared in two 2012 essay collections, Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity (ed. Ann Hawkins and Maura Ives) and Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siécle  (ed. Elizabeth Gray).   She also serves as editor of Victorian Periodicals Review.

 

Shannon Scott  is an adjunct Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas and St. Catherine University.  She teaches an eclectic range of courses—from the literature of film noir to werewolf literature to circus literature to the literature of food.  She has been published as a regular columnist in the Minnesota Women’s Press and The Minnesota Daily, and she has a chapter in the forthcoming anthology, She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves, published by Manchester UP. She is currently completing her MFA degree in Creative Fiction at Hamline University.

Scott has long been fascinated with werewolf stories, especially “the transformative nature of their bodies, the shift to an animal mind, to instinct and physical power.”

While Scott was working on her master’s degree in English, she took a Gothic novel course from Easley. A class paper Scott wrote on Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf was expanded to become her master’s essay.  Later, the two decided to team up as co-editors for the anthology, which was published a year ago by Valancourt Books. 

“In some stories, werewolves are a violent and terrifying emanations of the ‘beast within,’” Easley said, “and in others they are benevolent creatures who have been unfairly marginalized by mainstream society.

“Whether male or female, demonic or misunderstood, werewolves tell us a great deal about our own anxieties and fears, both past and present.”

Some of the werewolf stories in their anthology were written by familiar writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Rudyard Kipling. Others were accessible only through archival research at the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library and the British Library in London.

We hope you will join us – 2pm – Wednesday, October 30 – O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Room 108!   

Ho-o-o-o-o-wl!