Piatti-Farnell, Lorna
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, PhD, is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Auckland University of Technology, where she is also Director of the Popular Culture Research Centre. In addition, she is an adjunct professor at Curtin University (Australia) and a research fellow at Falmouth University (UK). She serves as the President of the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (GANZA) and the Coordinator of the Australasian Horror Studies Network. Her research interests lie at the intersection of film, popular media, and cultural history, and include a focus on corporeality, horror, technology, bio-ethics, eco-environmental studies, consumer culture, superheroes, and the Gothic. She has published widely in these areas, including volumes such as Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (Palgrave 2017), Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media (editor, Lexington 2019), and The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Popular Icons in Twenty-first-century Film and Popular Media (editor, Lexington 2021). Prof. Piatti-Farnell is sole editor of the Routledge Advances in Popular Culturebook series, as well as co-editor (together with Prof. Carl Sederholm) of the ‘Horror Studies’ series for Lexington Books.
Contributions
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EditorialMonsters are everywhere in our popular media narratives. They lurk in the shadows of video games and computer animations, ready to pounce. They haunt the frames of horror films and fantasy televisions shows. They burst out of panels in many comics and graphic novels, bringing with them grotesque forms and nightmarish transformations. They feature recurrently in...Read more
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EditorialThe Magic of Media and Culture In his book The History of Magic (2020), Chris Gosden contends that magic is a product of human connection with the universe, offering answers to questions of meaning and reality, and surviving for centuries because of its capacity for constant renewal. Furthermore, magic has been, and continues to be, tied to the activities...Read more
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Articles
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ArticlesDiscussing the interaction between representation and narrative structures, Anthony Mandal argues that the Gothic has always been “an intrinsically intertextual genre” (Mandal 350). From its inception, the intertextuality of the Gothic has taken many and varied incarnations, from simple references and allusions between texts—dates, locations, characters, and...Read more
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EditorialIn a field of study as well-established as the Gothic, it is surprising how much contention there is over precisely what that term refers to. Is Gothic a genre, for example, or a mode? Should it be only applicable to literary and film texts that deal with tropes of haunting and trauma set in a gloomy atmosphere, or might it meaningfully be applied to other cultural...Read more
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ArticlesIntroductionAs both a historical and cultural entity, the city of New Orleans has long-maintained a reputation as a centre for hedonistic and carnivaleque pleasures. Historically, images of mardi gras, jazz, and parties on the shores of the Mississippi have pervaded the cultural vision of the city as a “mecca” for “social life” (Marina 2), and successfully...Read more
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EditorialFor many, the very idea of ‘history’ calls into question narratives of the past, distant and disconnected from our contemporary moment, and out of tune with the media-centred world of our post-2000 popular culture. This approach to history, however, is based on profound misconceptions, and does not take into account the fact that the present is history: we experience our historical moment...Read more
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EditorialDreams have fascinated human cultures and societies for thousands of years. What dreams are, what they look like, and what they mean have been the centre of discussions in a variety of contexts, across disciplines, and languages. The very notion of ‘dream’ entails, on the one hand, something unattainable, whimsical, and even fantastic. Dreams reside, perhaps by definition, in the realm of...Read more
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FeatureIn 2019, Netflix released the first season of its highly anticipated show The Witcher. Based on the books of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the fantasy show tells the intersecting stories of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), the princess of Cintra Ciri (Freya Allan), and sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who is commonly referred to as a ‘mage’. Although...Read more
