Payel Dutta Chowdhury

Dr Payel Dutta Chowdhury is Professor and Director, School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at REVA University, Bangalore, India. She specializes in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Memory & Trauma Studies, and Crime Narratives. She takes active interest in the study of folk culture and literature from India’s northeast region. Her published works include Lockdown Diaries: Stories of Unusual Times (2020); Folktales from India’s Northeast (2020); The Nagas: Social and Cultural Identity – Texts and Contexts (2019); The Women of Phoolbari and Other Stories (2019); and Dynamics of Self, Family and Community (2017).

Asian Folklore, Folk Horror and the Gothic

The inaugural double event of the Gothic in Asia Association [GAA] organized in cooperation with the National Chengchi University [NCCU] in Taiwan.

Asian Popular Culture and the Gothic

An edited collection on Asian Popular Culture and the Gothic, edited by Li-hsin Hsu, Deimantas Valančiūnas and Katarzyna Ancuta. The collection is planned for submission to the Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies series.

GAA Membership Form

If you would like to become a member of Gothic in Asia Association, please fill in this form. Please indicate whether you would like us to post your profile on our website or whether you prefer to keep it private. Feel free to include links to any of your existing profiles.

The Hundred Secret Senses

The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan – These novels add ghostly and gory dimensions to Tan’s trademark plots featuring young, Chinese-American women questing after their family tree and a sense of belonging, negotiating their transnational ethnic identity. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)

Our Violent Ends

These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong. Young adult gothic-adjacent or Asian horror novels, these books retell something of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet story in the “melting-pot” of 1920s Shanghai. The young heirs of opposing Chinese and Russian emigree gangs do battle on city streets and across the foreign concessions. Then a bloody pandemic rages, leaving yet more mutilated corpses in the streets, that might require two dominating fathers ‘both alike in dignity’ and their extended families to cooperate towards a solution before their lucrative rackets collapse. Elements for dystopian and speculative fiction readers too (Sarah Olive, Bangor).

Samantha Landau

Samantha Landau is a Project Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Komaba), where she teaches courses focusing on American and Comparative Literature and Culture. Her research primarily concerns women\’s writing, supernatural and Gothic fiction, especially in the works of Shirley Jackson and Emily Dickinson. She also writes on the connections between poetry, culture, and music. She is currently working on a monograph on the Domestic Gothic. In 2019, she organized the international conference “Gothic Spaces” at The University of Tokyo. She is currently principal investigator on “Domestic Spaces in Gothic Literature,” an extended 3-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (KAKENHI) and “Ghosts and Outsiders in Gothic Fiction” a 4-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early Career Scientists (KAKENHI). She is co-editor of a special issue of Women’s Studies on Emily Dickinson and Music with Gerard Holmes (2021) and has contributed a public-facing lecture on Emily Dickinson and the Gothic to the Emily Dickinson International Society’s online lecture series (2020). Her most recent lecture was on Shirley Jackson, ritual, and contagion in The Haunting of Hill House. In addition to her life as an academic, Samantha has been singing and performing classical music and jazz for over 25 years. She currently studies voice with Professor Takeko Nagashima of Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.

Chiho Nakagawa

Dr Chiho Nakagawa is a Professor at Nara Women’s University in Nara, Japan. Her research interests include American women’s literature, Gothic novels, and more recently, crime fiction. Chiho has published in various international and Japanese journals and contributed book chapters, including “Safe Sex with the Defanged Vampires: New Vampire Heroes in Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries” (2011). Her contribution to Asian Gothic lies largely in her discussion of Seishi Yokomizo—who turned her interest into crime fiction—which appeared in Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (2013). She also translated David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Japanese (2013).

Sarah Olive

Dr Sarah Olive is a Senior Lecturer in English, Languages, and Applied Linguistics at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She researches and teaches at the intersections of children\’s and young adult literature, Shakespeare, and education. Recent publications include a guest edited issue of Cahiers Élisabéthains on \’Hot Shakespeare, Cool Japan\’ (110.1) and a co-authored article \’Secondary Shakespeare in the UK: pedagogies and practices\’ in Changing English with Victoria Elliott (both 2023). Her books include Shakespeare in East Asia Education co-authored with Kohei Uchimaru, Adele Lee and Rosalind Fielding (Palgrave 2021), as well as Shakespeare Valued: Education Policy and Practice, 1989-2009 (Intellect 2015). She is Lead Editor of the international, peer-reviewed journal Jeunesse: young people, texts, cultures (University of Toronto Press) and Founding Editor of the British Shakespeare Association\’s Teaching Shakespeare. In 2018, she co-ran the Gothic in Japan conference with Dr Alex Watson (Meiji), resulting in the collaborative creation of an online resource on British Gothic monsters in East Asian culture that reflects and enriches her own teaching.

Li-hsin Hsu

Dr Li-hsin Hsu is Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Emily Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Transatlantic studies, Transpacific studies, Orientalism, and Ecocriticism. She has guest-edited journal issues on transculture-related topics, including a special issue on “Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations: 1776 to the Present” for The Wenshan Review (June 2018), and a special issue on “International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation” for The Emily Dickinson Journal (Fall 2020). She has also contributed to a number of international journals and edited volumes, such as Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, Empire (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), on topics related to space and race. She is currently guest-editing a special issue on “EcoGothic Asia” for the SARE journal and co-editing a special issue on “Asian Gothic” for The Wenshan Review (with Katarzyna Ancuta).