Carol Margaret Davison

Dr. Carol Margaret Davison is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the newly formed Interdisciplinary and Critical Studies Department at the University of Windsor, Canada. A cultural teratologist, Death Studies scholar, and former Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar (University of Virginia, 2005), she is an award-winning, world-renowned expert on Gothic literature who has authored over 100 books, edited collections, book chapters, and articles devoted to that subject. Her edited collection, The Gothic and Death (Manchester University Press, 2017), won the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for best work of Gothic Criticism in 2019. Her creative ventures include her role as Creative Consultant to choreographer Mark Godden for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Dracula (1998), and her debut novel, Bodysnatcher, which was published by Ringwood Publishing in Glasgow, Scotland, in May of this year. This he-said, she-said Gothic historical romance with a few diabolical twists chronicles the “untold” story of the Burke and Hare murders as told by William (Billy) Burke and his partner, Helen (Nelly) McDougal. In its speculations about their increasingly violent relationship, Bodysnatcher is a powerful and sophisticated Gothic tale of poverty, desperation, love, and loss set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century Scotland in the throes of rebellion and transition. She is currently at work on her next Gothic novel, Malden, which is set in and around the former Malden Asylum that operated in Amherstburg between 1859-1870, and takes as its subject matter early Canadian history and nineteenth-century mental health therapies and theories during the “asylum craze”.