Event registration can be found here including tickets for Workshops and the Networking Event.
The full Programme can be found here.
Paper Speaker bios and full abstracts can be found here.
Keynotes and this year’s Reading List can be found here.
Our post on How to Join the Discord can be found here.
This programme is updated as needed. All times listed are BST, British Summer Time.
Seminar
This seminar runs from 16:35 –17:30 on Day 1 Wednesday May 7
Here, There, and Elsewhere: Editing for Inclusion and Access in a Fantasy Periodical
This seminar will see participants collaborate on a mock volume of Elsewhere, a fantasy fiction publication that seeks to work against harmful trends in fantasy publishing by centering those authors and works that have been historically marginalized. With emphasis on queer themes and representation, participants will pitch existing fantasy texts to either include or exclude from the volume and the rest of the group will debate. In doing so, we will collectively showcase existing diverse, accessible fantasy, as well as interrogate why many so-called canonical texts may not have a place in a project like Elsewhere. Come join us and add to your ever-growing to-read list!
Elsewhere is a fantasy fiction publication at the Univsersity of Glasgow run by Saige Severin, Stephen Welsh, Méganne Yasmeen Rizk, and Caleb Berk. Elsewhere aims to showcase works that resist the discriminatory history of fantasy publishing by actively seeking the voices of people often silenced by the genre, both in subject matter and authorship. Alongside many brilliant authors and editors around the world, we aim to move the fantasy genre away from its Western-exclusionary roots one magical story at a time. We are grateful to the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic for its support in Elsewhere‘s inaugural year!
Maximum number of participants: 30 (to be split in two groups depending on attendance)
Workshops
All Workshops run concurrently from 14:45 –16:00 on Day 2 Thursday May 8
(Limited spaces, Zoom links only available via Eventbrite)
4A: Together We Write Private Cathedrals: A Collaborative Epistolary Game about Queer Community and History with Stephen Welsh
This workshop will take participants through a creative writing and role-playing game, a version of Together We Write Private Cathedrals by Ben Auden Roswell, adapted to suit a larger group and the timeframe. Participants will engage in collaborative fantasy worldbuilding, then write and share letters and other documents from the perspectives of members of a queer community to create fragments of a historical record. The game will likely explore homophobia and transphobia – a content warning and safety tools will be used.
Stephen Welsh (he/him) is currently enrolled in the English Literature: Fantasy MLitt programme at the University of Glasgow. He studies part-time whilst working as a Lecturer in Communication and English at Edinburgh College, where he is trying to introduce more fantasy literature into the curriculum. When not studying or teaching he writes fantasy literature and designs games. He is currently co-writing a sourcebook of Scottish folklore for tabletop roleplaying games, to be published by Dragon Cult Games later this year. He lives in Edinburgh with his fiancé Rachel and their cats, Sasha and Jinkx (named after their favourite drag queens).
Maximum Number of Participants: 20
4B: Family (of) Trees: An Ecoqueer Fairytale & Fantasy Workshop with Catherine Olver
This writing workshop breathes life into the dead metaphor of the ‘family tree’, inviting participants to refuse its patriarchal appropriation and plot family trees growing queerly. We’ll begin by exploring the queerness of real trees and descriptively reimagining our own family relationships with or as trees. Pooling our readerly knowledge, we’ll discuss how traditional family trees oppress queer characters and the environment in fairytales and fantasy as patrilineal inheritance enforces gender binaries and heterosexual marriage to produce heirs to own the land—before having fun rewriting queer, more-than-human fairytale families.
Catherine Olver writes for a greener future and a proud queer present: through her poetry and fantasy for different age groups and through academic articles as an ecocritic with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Find her wandering @the_wordwoods on X and Instagram, and discover more of her creative and academic work at https://catherineolver.co.uk.
Maximum Number of Participants: 20
4C: Publishing WITHOUT Perishing: Mapping The Impossible’s Survival Guide to Student-led Publishing with Brianna Best and Rachel Milne
Abstract:
(Sad Sarah Mclachlan song playing) Everyday academic articles are abandoned, forgotten, or left in “only needs another three rounds of editing”, never to see the light of publishing. But today, you can make a change. If you join this workshop with the student-led fantastika journal Mapping the Impossible for the low price of just 75 minutes of your free time, our survival guide will cover the common pitfalls of perishing in publishing and how to avoid them, a behind-the-scenes look at how we edit articles for circulation, and a chance for editorial-level feedback on a piece of your own writing.
Bios:
Brianna Best (they/she) is the Editor-in-Chief of Mapping the Impossible: Journal of Fantasy Research and a PhD Candidate studying speculative fiction of the twenty-first century. They are interested in the breakdown between the genres of science fiction and fantasy and modes of irrational thinking as ways of understanding and surviving an irrational word in speculative fiction. They are also the co-founder of the speculative literary magazine Kismet.
Rachel Milne (she/her) is HDPSP-funded PhD candidate and undergraduate supervisor at the University of Cambridge. Her research sits at the intersections between Critical Disability Studies, Critical Neurodiversity Studies, and Queer Studies in children’s literature and screen cultures. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and she has presented her work internationally. She has also organised various conferences, is an Associate Editor for Mapping the Impossible, and a member of the Executive Committee for the British Comparative Literature Association.
Maximum Number of Participants: 16
Roundtables
Opening Roundtable: Queering the Fantastic
Day 1 Wednesday May 7 2025 12:45-13:45
Researchers discuss their research in the context of this year’s GIFCon theme “Queering the Fantastic”.
From the Call for Papers:
In this conference, we would like to engage with the following questions: How are fantastic narratives reclaimed by people in the margins? What are the implications of such reimaginings? How do we envision a queer future of SFF in terms of multi-media creations and scholarly work? And what challenges will the field/genre face to reach this future?
Roundtable Participants:
Anna Oleszczuk (she/they) is a queer academic hoping to defend her PhD thesis on the patterns of engagement with queerness in explicitly queer speculative comics (those that actually foreground queerness which helps to center my research on the marginalized groups and remove the well-known burden of having to queer the text in order to unearth its queerness). She plans to focus more on webcomics, as they’re also in the final stages of a grant project on speculative webcomics (currently interpreting results and slowly turning them into publications).
Emma Tueller Stone (she/her) and I’m currently a third year PhD student in Cambridge’s Children’s Literature program. My research focuses on depictions of gender and gendered roles in Mormon/Latter-day Saint authored Young Adult (YA) speculative fiction published from 1985 to 2015. I look at how gender intersects with ideas of “growing up” and 19th century Mormon doctrines around theosis (or deification) and the feminine divine.
Sam Tegtmeyer (he/him) is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. His project ‘Opening a Canon of Maggots: Tradition, Innovation, and the Ideologies of Fantasy’ explores the pernicious persistence of problematic ideologies in the Fantasy genre and the ways authors conscious of that persistence have challenged it. He is the recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship and will spend a month in the author’s archives focusing on the notes, sketches, and drafts of her Earthsea series. Sam has been repeatedly told by others since starting the PhD that he is a theorist, which still astounds him.
Sydney Brouillard-Coyle (pronouns ney/nem/nir) is a queer, transgender, nonbinary activist, author, and scholar. Ney published nir first book, “A Pocket Guide to Pronouns”, in late 2023. Ney are currently working on a PhD in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Nir research focuses on the importance of creative arts spaces for trans and gender diverse folks. Ney completed nir Masters of Arts in Social Justice and Community Engagement in 2024, where nir research examined queer representation in young adult fantasy novels. Ney are a passionate writer and community educator.
Chair: Rebecca Gault
Deputy Chair: Lilly Golich
Roundtable: Omegaverse Fanfiction and the Politics of Fantasy
Day 3 Friday May 9 2025 15:30 – 16:30
Stories in the highly popular genre of omegaverse fanfiction imagine a biologically determined, pheromone-driven system of human reproduction in which dominant Alphas mate with submissive Omegas. Sexual and romantic fantasies play out through myriad iterations of this system across fandoms and in professional fiction, the vast majority of which depict sex between men. We discuss the contradictory politics invoked within this genre as it circulates through diverse and transnational audiences. How can an intersectional, decolonial analysis help us think through the simultaneous presence of wild queer imagination and intense biological determinism?
Roundtable Participants:
Ann Alex is a graduate student in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is interested in how western digital technologies enable misogyny while structurally invisiblizing caste and class differences. She critically engages with digital media studies to highlight the intersecting modalities of race, gender, caste, and class that shape fan identities and activities online. Through a decolonial and transnational lens, her work explores the interplay between Eastern and Western popular media, focusing on the fan reception and representation of South Korean and American media within global digital cultures.
Kristina Busse has a PhD in English from Tulane University and teaches at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is an active media fan and has published widely on fan fiction and fan cultures. Her works include the coedited Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (2012), and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014) as well as her essay collection Framing Fan Fiction (2017). Kristina is the cofounder of Transformative Works and Culture and former editor (2008–22).
Tanvi Chowdhury is PhD candidate in the English Department at Ashoka University, Haryana. She studies the complicated interrelations between readership, book histories, and digital spaces. She has worked on textual practices in Austen’s work, fanfiction and fannish reading. She has also worked on writing trends in the contemporary fantasy fiction writing of Naomi Novik and JK Rowling focusing on decolonial receptions. Her research focussed on reading practices in the Digital Age, specifically on South Asia – to examine the impact of internet reading cultures in North Indian metropolitan cities like Lucknow and Delhi. When she’s not working on her research, she makes attempts to write creatively as well.
Alexis Lothian is Associate Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland College Park. Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and fan culture and their relationships to gender, race, and disability justice. She is the author of Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (NYU Press, 2018) and has published in Utopian Studies, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, and Camera Obscura, among other venues. She co-edits the Queer/Trans/Digital/Diaspora series for NYU Press.
Chair: Alexis Lothian
Deputy Chair: Meganne Rizk