In this online panel, we’ll be exploring how and why fanfiction matters, discussing fanfiction in the academic sector, the jump from fanfiction-writing to publishing, the collaborative aspect of fanfiction-writing, fanfiction as providing vital representation where canon doesn’t, and more!

 

Dr Judith Fathallah (she/her) is an Outreach and Research Associate in the Department of Organisation, Work & Technology at Lancaster University. Her research interests include new media literacy, digital cultures, fan studies, fanfiction, gender, online cultures, media convergence, and subcultural studies. Fathallah is the author of multiple papers on said topics, as well as of Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (2017) and Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture (2020). She is also a member of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, an international partnership of researchers, universities, libraries, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers, working to establish a more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and not-for-profit publishing ecosystem that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply.

 

MandalaRose (she/her) aka ‘Manda,’ is a queer, neurodiverse, US-based fanfiction author who was living a (mostly) ordinary life as a casual fan of the television program Supernatural, until the show’s charming and unfairly attractive monster-hunting protagonist with the emotional intelligence of a turnip revealed he’d given a mixtape to his socially awkward but devastatingly handsome angel ‘buddy.’ She fell head-first into the world of Destiel (Dean Winchester/Castiel) fanfiction and has been writing her own fic since 2018. Her works have twice been featured on the popular Destiel fandom podcast, ‘Mixtape Bookclub’ and she’ll appear as a returning panellist at fan-run convention, ‘A More Profound Con,’ in November 2022. Manda has undergraduate and graduate degrees that have absolutely nothing to do with writing, which she uses in her day job, as no one has offered to pay her a full-time salary for making up stories (yet).

 

Katie Rathfelder (she/they) is a writer and editor, queer, and a life-long fan and nerd. In 2020 their short story ‘Seaview on Mars,’ a story about legacies and community, featured in Consolidation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction For A Time of Pandemic, an anthology of twelve tales of speculative fiction whose proceeds were donated to the COVID-19 appeal run by the UCLH Charity, the charity supporting the University College London Hospitals NHS Trust. She also writes fanfiction for many different fandoms, among which is the popular 2022 TV series Our Flag Means Death, and publishes on AO3, (Archive of Our Own), a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting site for transformative fanworks such as fanfiction, designed and built by and for fans.

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