Rebecca Ducncan

LNUC Concurrences Member Rebecca Duncan awarded the Justin D. Edwards Prize

LNUC Concurrences member and Researcher in English Rebecca Duncan has won the Justin D. Edwards Prize for her edited volume The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

The prize is awarded by the International Gothic Association (IGA) to a collection that has significantly advanced the field of Gothic Studies. In 2024, it was won jointly by The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic and The Cambridge History of the Gothic, edited by Dale Townshend, Angela Wright and Catherine Spooner.

The prize-giving ceremony took place at Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax, Canada), where the 2024 iteration of the IGA’s biannual conference was hosted. Rebecca was present at the conference to receive the award and extend congratulations to all the book’s contributors, including LNUC Concurrences member Johan Höglund, who wrote the chapter titled ‘Globalgothic, Viruses and Pandemics’.

Summarizing the judges’ review of The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, Chair of the IGA Book Prize Committee Sara Wasson emphasizes the volume’s attention to ‘centuries … of colonial and settler extractivist violence’, and reports that ‘panelists noted how this collection has already transformed conversations and thinking within our field.’

The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic aims to move beyond the established globalization-based approach to gothic fictions in the international context, examining instead how gothic forms respond to the local socio-ecological effects of transregional relationships and histories. Chapters address – among others – resource imperialism, (ongoing) colonial history, diasporic identity, buckling economic unions, the rise of the internet, ethnonationalism, and entangled systems of gendered, racialised and ecocidal power. Accordingly, the collection demonstrates that gothic is a key – though sometimes complicit – cultural register for negotiating the challenges of our uneven planetary present.

More information about The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, as well as links to Open Access chapters, can be found on the Edinburgh University Press website, here. The volume is also available as an e-book in the LNU Library catalogue.