Susan Johnston

Susan Johnston teaches and supervises undergraduate and graduate work in Victorian literature and culture, literary historiography, book history, and fantasy literature. Recent 19th century classes have included Reading the Victorian Home; Victorian Masculinities; Victorian Crimes; Nationhood and Nationalism in the Long 19th Century. In fantasy and popular culture, she has offered such topics as Fantasy After Tolkien and single author classes in both J.K. Rowling and George R.R. Martin as well as graduate classes in Screening the Novel.

Her current research, with collaborator Kathryn Nogue, involves the circulation of ideas of crime and criminality vertically through registers of Victorian print culture, including newspapers and broadside ballads.

Representative Publications:

Books
Jess Battis and Susan Johnston, eds. Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on A Song of Ice and Fire (essay collection). Jefferson: McFarland, 2015.

Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction. (book) Westport, CT.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.

Chapters and Articles:
"Abjection, Masculinity, and Sacrifice: The Reek of Death in Game of Thrones." (article) Men and Masculinities. September 20, 2021.

"Needful Things: Dickens, Social Justice, and the Meaning of Human Work." (chapter) Theological Dickens, ed. Brenda Ayres and Sara Maier. New York: Routledge, 2021.

"Concupiscence, Coercion, and the Communion of Persons: Reading the Rape of Cersei." (chapter) Theology and Game of Thrones, ed. Matthew Brake. Pop Culture and Theology Ser. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books and Fortress Academic, 2021.

"Factory Time: Mechanization and Monotony in the Victorian Imagnation." The Rail, the Body and the Pen: Essays on Travel, Medicine and Technology in 19th Century British Literature, ed. Brian Cowlishaw. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021. 92-108.

"When Are We Ever at Home? Exile and Nostalgia in the Work of Guy Gavriel Kay." (chapter) Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes, ed. Amy Ransom and Dominick Grace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

"Family Man: Walter White and the Failure of Fatherhood." (chapter) Masculinity in Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives, ed. Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw. Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 13-32.

Cheng, Stephen, and Susan Johnston. "Participation in peer-led academic support services: One adaptaion of a natural sciences peer learning model to enrichment in the humanities." (article). Journal of Peer Learning 7 (2014): 23-25. Web

"The Queen City Muggles: Town and Gown Go to Hogwarts." (chapter) Teaching with Harry Potter: Essays on Classroom Wizardry from Elementary School to College, ed. Valerie Estelle Frankel. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2013.

"Re-mastering the Art of Frence Cooking: Adaptaion, Anamnesis and Authenticity in Julie and Julia." (article) The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5.3 (2012): 263-82

"Grief poignant as joy: Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe in A Song of Ice and Fire." (article) Mythlore 31,1/2 (2012): 133-54.

"Harry Potter, Eucatastrophe, and Christian Hope." (article) Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 14.1 (2011): 66-90.

"Historical Picturesque: Adapting Great Expectations and Sense and Sensibility." (article reprint) Dickens Adapted, ed. John Glavin. A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. Orig. pub. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.1 (2004): 167-83.

"After the Deluge: Rethinking Ethical Interpretation." (article reprint) Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, ed. Peter C. Herman, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. 199-210. Orig. pub. Symplokē 3.1 (1995): 87-100.