STEPHANIE A. GRAVES

As the chair of the Southern Gothic area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South conference, I am delighted to share the Call for Proposals for the 2025 Conference.

I’m delighted to serve as one of two keynote speakers at the University of Memphis English Graduate Organization conference April 25-26th, 2025. The conference theme, which is right up my research alley, is “Learning from Fear,” and there is an embedded ARG (Alternate Reality Game) embedded within / alongside the conference.

Spring 2025 Course Syllabus: Composition, Media, and Rhetoric

I’m revamping my composition course theme for Spring 2024!

One of the most popular and enduring subgenres of horror film, the slasher initially hacked its way onto the big screen and into the cultural imaginary in the 1970s. Like other monsters in the horror canon, the slasher villain—wielding a variety of weapons, from knives, machetes, and axes to sickles, chainsaws, and the occasional wood chipper or bread slicer—has long functioned as a manifestation of the “monster as metaphor,” a means through which horror engages in critique of cultural ideologies. What I want to consider in this paper is the idea that throughout the slasher cycles of the 70s and 80s, the mid- to late 90s and early 2000s, the Post-9/11 era, and continuing into our current neoslasher era, the slasher villain is and always has been directly shaped by the concomitant influences of our repressed cultural fears and the rise of sociopolitical conservativism.