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.
Workshops and Roundtable information can be found here.
Our post on How to Join the Discord can be found here.

Written by GIFCon 2025 Social Media Officer Lea Warren.

If you’ve been keeping up with our social media, you might have seen our TBR recommendations over the last few weeks to brush up on some of the works that will feature at this year’s GIFCon.

But the books we’ve highlighted are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the incredible texts we’ll be covering over GIFCon’s three days of panels, workshops, roundtables, keynotes, and more. And even with three packed days of queer fantasy conversations, we’ll only manage to cover a fraction of what is out there for fantasy readers.

That’s why, in addition to creating a TBR list for GIFCon 2025, we’ve also explored the general landscape of queer fantastika today. We couldn’t help but wonder – how popular are queer fantasy stories in the general market? Which titles are selling the best? Are there any new voices that we should be snagging on our next trip to the bookstore?

To help answer a few of these questions, we took a trip to Category Is Books, a beloved queer indie bookshop here in Glasgow. Category Is Books ‘is a space to learn about, be inspired by and share in our love of queer books, history, art, activism, writing and storytelling’, which made it the perfect place to do a bit of sleuthing on queer fantastika favourites.

The Category Is shelves also feature the works of well-loved fantasy authors like Marlon James, N.K. Jemisin, Tasha Suri, and A. K. Mulford, among others, making for a booklist that is wonderfully diverse in its authors and its stories. During the visit, a staff member recommended The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry by Sarah Shin, which our very own Deputy Chair Grace snapped up (we’ll have to ask her what she thinks once she’s had the chance to give them a read!).

Overall, exploring the shelves of Category Is not only reinforced just how broad the landscape of queer fantastika is, but also got us even more excited to dive into this year’s theme at GIFCon 2025.

If you’re in the Glasgow area and are looking for your new favourite fantasy read, we highly recommend a stop through Category Is Books! https://www.categoryisbooks.com/

If you’re looking to brush up on queer fantasy for GIFCon, or just for fun, we’ve got you covered. Check out our TBR list of some of the texts our incredible panelists, Keynote speakers, and workshop leaders will be covering at GIFCon 2025.

Books, Novellas, Short Stories & Poetry:

• Mantis by Julia Armfield (short story)
• Modern Tales of Faerie by Holly Black (collection of short stories)
• Gemma Doyle series by Libba Bray
• The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (collection of short stories)
• Peter Darling by Austin Chant
• Decolonising the Conrad Canon by Alice M. Chapman-Kelly*
• Fanfiction as Queer Healing: Femslash Authorship and the Swan Queen Ship by Alice M. Chapman-Kelly*
• The Unbroken by C. L. Clark
• Monstrilio by Samano Cordova
• Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson
• Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue (short story)
• The End Crowns All by Bea Fitzgerald
• The Fallen-Fey Chronicles series by S.L. Gavyn
• Spear by Nicola Griffith (novella)
• Annals of the Western Shore series by Ursula K. Le Guinn
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guinn
• Grab the Bull by the Horns by Sam Hall
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• The Meat Tree by Gwyneth Lewis
• Ash by Malinda Lo (short story)
• No & Other Love Stories by Kirsty Logan* (collection of short stories)
• Now She is Witch by Kirsty Logan*
• Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan*
• The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan*
• The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan*
• Elemental Logic by J. Marks
• Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey
• Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing through the Mirrorshades: Seeing Through the Mirrorshade by Anna McFarlane*
• The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities edited by Anna McFarlane* and Donna McCormack
• Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
• Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
• Dark Fey trilogy by Cynthia A. Morgan
• The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
• The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
• A Fairytale for Everyone edited by Boldizar M. Nagy (collection of short stories)
• Princess Princess Ever After by Kay O’Neill
• The Tea Dragon Society by Kay O’Neill
• Little Thieves trilogy by Margaret Owen
• Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
• Wain by Rachel Pummer (short story)
• Duskwalker Brides series by Opal Reyne
• Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
• Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (poetry)
• Bluebeard’s First Wife by Seong-Nan (short story)
• Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
• Mail Order Minotaur by Lilith Stone
• Tangleweed and Brine by Deirdre Sullivan (collection of short stories)
• The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri
• Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
• The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer
• Dragon’s Bait by Vivian Vande Velde
• Tales From Beyond the Rainbow by Pete Jori Wood (short story)
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf

*Keynote speaker at GIFCon 2025

Film/TV:

• Gawain and the Green Knight (1991)
• Hercules (1997)
• Supernatural (2005 – 2020)
• Sherlock (2010 – 2017)
• Teen Wolf (2011 – 2017)
• Troy: Fall of a City (2018)
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018 – 2020)
• The Untamed (2019)
• The Owl House (2020 – 2023)
• Gawain and the Green Knight (2021)
• Arcane (2021 – 2024)
• First Kill (2022)
• The Sandman (2022 – 2025)
• House of the Dragon (2022 – )

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.
Workshops and Roundtable information can be found here.
The Crafting Your Queer Fantasy TBR post can be found here.
Our post on How to Join the Discord can be found here.

Please find below our keynote speakers for this year’s GIFCon, the reading list in collaboration with Glasgow’s own Category is Books will be coming soon!

Kirsty Logan

Keynote
Wednesday May 7, 2025 from 15:30 – 16:30 BST

The ABCs of Queer Horror: Appetite, Bodies and Coveting (or Craving?)

Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the story collection No & Other Love Stories and the memoir The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. She is also the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She is currently collaborating on several projects across film, TV, collaborative chapbooks, and performance.

Kirsty Logan’s Keynote will cover her work more generally but primarily focus on two of her texts: Things We Say in the Dark and No and Other Love Stories. Both of these compelling volumes of stories focus on women’s experiences, rendered through Kirsty Logan’s distinctive style—one that shifts between the dark, the emotional, the humorous, the tender, and, at times, the unsettling in familiar and yet “queered” worlds. Other favorites of her work include The Gracekeepers, Now She is Witch, and The Gloaming where she combines fantasy, female desire, myths, history, horror, loss, and mystery in her detailed characters and narratives.

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Anna McFarlane

Keynote
Thursday May 8, 2025 from 13:30—14:30 BST

‘Fantasy and Trauma: Imagining a Queer Pregnancy’

Anna McFarlane is a Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research on traumatic pregnancy in fantastika was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and she is a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome-Trust funded Future of Human Reproduction project. She is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

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Dr. Alice M. Chapman-Kelly

Keynote
Friday May 9, 2025 from 12:45-13:45 BST

Queer Friendships, Soft Workplaces and the Other Comforts of the Swan Queen Archive – Some Thoughts on Why We Read Fic.

Dr Alice M. Chapman-Kelly is a Teaching Associate at the University of Strathclyde. She has published widely on the relationship between lesbian literary history and femslash fanfiction and is the author of two academic monographs, Decolonising the Conrad (Liverpool UP, 2022) and Fanfiction as Queer Healing: Femslash Authorship and the Swan Queen Ship (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). 

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 19^th 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
 

Event registration can be found here including tickets for Workshops and the Networking Event.
Speaker abstract and bios can be found here.
Keynotes and this year’s Reading List can be found here.
Workshops and Roundtable information can be found here.
The Crafting Your Queer Fantasy TBR post 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.

12:30-12:45 Platform Wide Welcome and explanation of the mechanics with Will Tattersdill
12:45-13:45 Opening Roundtable: Queering the Fantastic in 2025 with Anna Oleszczuk, Emma Tueller Stone, Sam Tegtmeyer, and Sydney Brouillard-Coyle Chair: Rebecca Gault Deputy Chair: Lily Golich
13:45-14:00 Break
Panels 1 14:00 – 15:15
Panel 1A   Queering Medieval Retellings Chair: Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Makayla Widger 14:00 Gabriella Fryer “Marvellous wound”: a medieval-queer reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber 14:20 Tam Moules Armour, Body Parts, and Queer Masculinity in Arthurian Retellings 14:40 Cheryl Myfanwy Morgan The Fourth Branch – Past and Future 15:00 Discussion	Panel 1B Fairy Stories Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Meganne Rizk 14:00 Silvia E. Storti Queering villainy: disruptive storytelling in contemporary fairy-tale narratives 14:20 Paula Rivera Donoso The queer/crip fantasy journey in ‘Las flores crecerán sobre mi cuerpo’, by TopoPanda 14:40 Catherine Olver Family (of) Trees? More-Than-Human Families in Queer Fairytales 15:00 Discussion		Panel 1C Magic and Liminality Chair: Hollie Willis Deputy Chair: Rachel England 14:00 Harry Rollison “She’d be both, or none at all […] a witch and a wizard too”: Queering the Gendered Magical Binary in Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites 14:20 Orla Davey ‘Reweave the Threads of Fate’: Femslash Fantasy and Queering the Classical Myth Canon 14:40 Elisa Pesce Transcending Life, Death, and Magic: The Falt Lines of Identity in Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys 15:00 Discussion
15:15– 15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:30 Keynote Kirsty Logan Chairs: Grace A.T. Worm and Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Rachel England
16:30-16:35 Short Break
16:35 –17:30 Seminar – Here, There, and Elsewhere: Editing for Inclusion and Access in a Fantasy Periodical with Saige Severin, Stephen Welsh, Méganne Yasmeen Rizk, and Caleb Berk Fantasy MLitt Fiction Journal Elsewhere in the Discord Deputy Chair: Will Tattersdill (Limited spaces, Zoom links only available via Eventbrite ticketing)
17:30-17:35 Short Break
Panels 2 17:35-18:50
Panel 2A   Cooperative Identity Explorations Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 17:35 Caighlan Smith Challenging Chronos: Re-Queering Classical Mythology in Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical 17:55 Emma French “They hate to see a girlboss winning”: the reinvisioning of race and sexuality within D&D’s drow elves 18:15 Alexis Lothian “White Men, Otherwise? Slash Fanfiction, Race, and the Persistence of Slavefic”  18:35 Discussion		Panel 2B Lud-in-the-Mist Chair: Mercury Natis Deputy Chair: Sam Tegtmeyer 17:35 Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad One With the Silent People: Queerness and Fairy Fruit in Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist 17:55 Saige Severin The Erotic as Magic: Fantasy and Lasting Political Action 18:15 Amy Richmond “The blood of the tree spreading over her tongue”: Drinking the Juices of Queer Power 18:35 Discussion
19:00– 19:45 The University of Glasgow Fantasy Master’s in Literature 10 Year Anniversary Event with Dr. Robert Maslen

Day 2: Thursday May 8, 2025

Panels 3 9:30 – 11:10
Panel 3A Monstrosity and Queer Narrative Chair: Joseph Paolantonacci Deputy Chair: Stephen Welsh 9:30 Frankie Bradley Monstrous Love & Queer Identity 9:50 María de la O Ruiz Rodríguez The Vampire Revolution: Gothic, Queerness, and Subversion in V. E. Schwab’s First Kill (2022) 10:10 Faarih Gothic Sanguinities: Reimagining Vampiric Metaphors in the Post-AIDS Era 10:30 Discussion		Panel 3B Explorations of Normativity Chair: Sam Tegtmeyer Deputy Chair: Saige Severin 9:30 Taylor Driggers ‘All people are glyphs’: Queer Kinship and the Politics of Reading in Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore 9:50 Nike Sulway “To meet once more as aliens”: exploring the relevance of fantastic literature for queer studies 10:10 Sarah Courtis Write my way out (of the closet): challenging the compulsory heterosexual narrative of fantasy musicals 10:30 Zvonimir Prtenjača Destabilizing Homonormativity: Wiccan from Marvel Comics’ Young Avengers and The Children’s Crusade to Disney+’s Agatha All Along 10:50 Discussion
11:10 – 11:20 Break
11:20-12:20 GIFCon 2025 Networking Event with Grace A.T. Worm Deputy Chair: Lea Warren Ticketed attendees only, see Eventbrite for tickets and information (currently sold-out with waiting list)
12:20–13:20 Lunch Break Research Spotlight in the Discord with Mercury Natis
13:20-13:30 Break
13:30—14:30: Keynote Anna McFarlane Chair: Will Tattersdill Deputy Chair: Reese Reynolds
14:30 – 14:45 Break
14:45 –16:00 Panels 4: Workshops (Limited spaces, Zoom links only available via Eventbrite ticketing) 4A: Together We Write Private Cathedrals: A Collaborative Epistolary Game about Queer Community and History with Stephen Welsh Deputy Chair: Lorna Ross 4B: Family (of) Trees: An Ecoqueer Fairytale & Fantasy Workshop with Catherine Olver Deputy Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui 4C: Publishing WITHOUT Perishing: Mapping The Impossible’s Survival Guide to Student-led Publishing with Brianna Best and Rachel Milne Deputy Chair: Grace A.T. Worm
16:00-16:15 Break
Panels 5 16:15 – 17:30
Panel 5A Interrogating Foundations Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Rachel England 16:15 Eleanor Patterson Outside the Box: Form and Gender in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman 16:35 Robin Anne Reid An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies 16:55 Mercury Natis Against Correct and Sober Taste: Tolkien and Sontag on Faërie and Camp 17:15 Discussion	Panel 5B Reimagining Queer Representations Chair: Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Reese Reynolds 16:15 C.T. Power House of the Dragon: Making Things Perfectly Queer 16:35 Makayla Wigder “Is My Hair Out?”: The Queer-Coding of Hercules’ Hades 16:55 Katarina Dulude What if I Choose the Dream?: Exploring Fantastic Otherworlds in Queer Neo-Victorian Texts 17:15 Discussion		Panel 5C Fanfiction and Fandom  Chair: Hollie Willis Deputy Chair: Lilly Golich 16:15 Anna Bark Persson “Sword Lesbians: Fantastic Fantasies in Fantasy Fiction and Fandom” 16:35 Alexandra Davies “Are we too heteronormative?”: Mpreg and transgression in Teen Wolf fanfiction 16:55 Kashish Gera “From Ships to Shifts: Exploring Queer Transformations and Reader Biases Across Fanfiction Platforms” 17:15 Discussion
17:30-Later Gaming Expo and Play in the Discord—Hades II & Jackbox Games

Day 3: Friday May 9, 2024

Panel 6 10:00 – 11:40
Panel 6A Borderlines and Marginalization Chair: Will Tattersdill Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 10:00 Elizabeth Elliott Early modern Scottish fantasy: Queer embodiment and practices of social exclusion in The Gyre Carling 10:20 Alex Henderson The Queer Trickster in Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves 10:40 Rheanna Mathews Queer Temporality and Disenfranchised Grief in Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne 11:00 Nathaniel Harrington “Fully male and hold-bred”: Sexuality, class, and the construction of gender in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern 11:20 Discussion		Panel 6B Worldbuilding and Queer Identity  Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui Deputy Chair: Lilly Golich 10:00 Stephanie Rincon Ramos Reimagining Resistance: Postcolonial and Environmental Visions in She-Ra and The Owl House 10:20 Şevval Tufan Queering the Weird: Rethinking Ecology and Nonhuman Entanglements in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) 10:40 Laura García Soria “Boy Island’: Trans Creationism and a New Materialist Approach to Gender” 11:00 Laura Ciriza Martín Just because something has always been done…”: Gender, Sexuality, and Binaries in Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree 11:20 Discussion
11:40 – 12:45 Lunch Break
12:45-13:45 Keynote Alice Chapman-Kelly Chair: Matthew Sangster Deputy Chair: Saige Severin
13:45-14:00 Break
Panels 7 14:00 – 15:15
Panel 7A Gaming and Queerness Chair: Grace A.T. Worm Deputy Chair: Saige Severin 14:00 Stephen Welsh Playing with queerness in Monsterhearts 2 and Thirsty Sword Lesbians  14:20 Reese Reynolds “Coming Full Circle: Cozy Gaming and Capitalist Narrativity” 14:40 Jamie Nicholas, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, &Catherine Flick ‘From where I stand, you’re all legs’. Expectation, Desire and Queerness in Dragon Age: Veilguard 15:00 Discussion	Panel 7B Family Dynamics and Children’s Media Chair: Joseph Paolantonacci Deputy Chair: Makayla Widger 14:00 Isabelle Hanshue Monsters Who Inspire Love: Monstrosity and the Queer Family Dynamic in Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Novel Monstrilio 14:20 Inês Guedes Vaz Us Princesses Have to Stick Together: Uses and Representations of Queerness in Contemporary YA Fantasy Animation 14:40 Madeline Wahl “I think we ought to live happily ever after”: Chosen Family and Family Representation in Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 15:00 Discussion		Panel 7C Queer Utopias Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 14:00 Rebecca Gault Dystopic Queer Futures in Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade Series 14:20 Meg Horridge Stepping Out of Time: Towards a Queer Utopia 14:40 Rebecca Jones Queer Communities as Utopias of Potentiality in the Graphic Novels of Kay O’Neill 15:00 Discussion
15:15-15:30 Break
15:30 – 16:30 Roundtable: Omegaverse Fanfiction and the Politics of Fantasy with Ann Alex, Kristina Busse, Tanvi Chowdhury, and Alexis Lothian Chair: Alexis Lothian Deputy Chair: Meganne Rizk
16:45-17:45 Artist Spotlight in the Discord with Elisabeth (Essa) Flett