David Kociemba (Editor)

Emerson College (USA)
David Kociemba has taught at five colleges and universities in Massachusetts over the past nine years. Past courses include introductory media history classes and seminars devoted to exploring topics like the representation of physical disability, video art, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. David has previously written for Slayage, Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica: Finding the Way Home, Buffy and Angel Conquer the Internet: Essays on Online Fandom, A Dragon Ate My Prom (forthcoming), and Teaching with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (McFarland, 2010). He won the 2007 Short Mr. Pointy Award for his article, "'Actually, it explains a lot': Reading the Opening Title Sequences of BtVS." He appeared in the movie Playing Columbine.
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Kristen Romanelli (Web Editor)

Kristen is not affiliated with any academic institution, but she is passionate about creating an online journal devoted to undergraduate points of view in media studies. She completed her B.A. in Creative Writing (with a minor in New Media, Film, and Television) at Fairfield University.
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Jes Battis

Simon Fraser University (USA)
Keywords: Media and pop culture, children's/teen literature, fantasy, television genres, queer representation and gender studies
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Tanya Cochran

Union College (USA)
Tanya R. Cochran, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Communication in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she teaches first-year writing and rhetoric and coordinates the Studio for Writing and Speaking. Her essays on Buffy appear in Televising Queer Women (Palgrave, 2007) and Sith, Slayers, Stargates + Cyborgs: Modern Mythology in the New Millennium (Lang, 2008). With Rhonda V. Wilcox, she coedited Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (Tauris, 2008). Past chair for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area of the Popular/American Culture Association, Cochran currently holds editorial board positions for Slayage and Watcher Junior and is the secretary-treasurer of the Whedon Studies Association. One of her latest projects with co-producers Heather Porter and Jen Swanston is Whedonversed, a documentary about Whedon scholars and fans.
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James Francis, Jr.

Texas A&M University (USA)
Keywords: Short Story Theory, Creative Writing, Identity Construction, Film Studies
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Hélène Frohard-Dourlent

University of British Columbia (Canada)
Hélène Frohard-Dourlent is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her research interests are in feminist critical theory and cultural studies, with special attention to the topics of education, gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity. Her essay on Buffy's relationship with Satsu was published in 2010 in the book Sexual Rhetoric in the Works of Joss Whedon, and her follow-up essay on readers' reactions to the Buffy/Satsu story won the Mr. Pointy award for best paper at the 2010 Slayage conference on the Whedonverses.

Candra Gill

Northern Michigan University (USA)
Candra K. Gill received her B.A. in English from Truman State University and her M.A. in English from Northern Michigan University where she was also an adjunct instructor. She currently works in student affairs at the University of Michigan. Her essay, "Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First: Dynamics of Race in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was published in Girls Who Bite Back. She has presented papers at PCA/ACA, Slayage, WisCon and other conferences. She is a founder and on the steering committee of the Carl Brandon Society and is a volunteer with the Organization for Transformative Works.

Keywords: Race and ethnicity, cultural studies, intersectionality, media studies, postcolonialism, feminism and gender, media fandom, convergence and transmedia

Jacob Held

Marquette University (USA)
Keywords: Philosophy and psychoanalysis
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Alysa Hornick

New York University (USA)
Alysa Hornick got her B.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University, and her MLIS from Long Island University, and currently works for NYU's Division of Libraries. Alysa has been a Whedonverse fan since early-1997, when she and Buffy were both high school sophomores, and has maintained the ‘official' online Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography as a hobby since 2005. She is a member of the Whedon Studies Association, and has attended several Slayage conferences. She is also a member of the Organization for Transformative Works.

Keywords: Gender studies, feminism, postmodernism, media and pop culture, media fandom, fan fiction and communities, food studies, general history and bibliography

Jodie A. Kreider

University of Denver (USA)
Jodie A. Kreider is a Lecturer in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Denver. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern European, British, and Comparative Women's history from the University of Arizona and a Masters in Teaching from Washington University in Saint Louis, MO. She has published on gender and Welsh nationalism in the North American Journal of Welsh Studies. She teaches courses on Celtic Identities, British and Irish history, and has taught a First Year Seminar on Gender, Feminism, Power and Pop-Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the past four years. Based on those experiences, Kreider presented on teaching with Buffy at the last several Slayage conferences, and co-edited Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer to which she also contributed.

Keywords: Gender, feminism, Romanticism, history, theory, post-modernism, Britain, masculinity

Lori C. Patton

Vanderbilt University (USA)
Keywords: Religious studies, psychology, media fandom, cultural anthropology
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Caroline Ruddell

Brunel University (UK)
Keywords: Identity and subjectivity in film/TV and culture, splitting and fragmentary characters, psychoanalysis, speech and power
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Cynthia Ryan

Middle Tennessee State University (USA)
Keywords: Media and pop culture, fan fiction and communities, queer representation and gender studies, classical mythology, technical work/television production, religion/spirituality, fantasy
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Lauren Schultz

Montgomery University (USA)
Lauren Schultz has a Master's in Literature from American University in Washington D.C., where she wrote her Master's Thesis comparing the narrative structures of Buffy and Harry Potter. Lauren has taught various composition and persuasive rhetoric courses at Montgomery University in Maryland. She has presented at both the Slayage 3 and Slayage 4 Conferences, and has published "Concepts of Identity When Nancy Drew Meets Buffy" in Buffy Meets the Academy: Essays on the Episodes and Scripts as Text. She will also have a chapter on Joss Whedon and Feminism published in Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery's forthcoming collection The Essential Whedon Reader.

Keywords: Feminism and Gender, Adolescence and Fantasy Literature, Young Adult Literature and Teenage Identity, the Body/Physicality, Postmodernism, Narratology, Persuasive Writing/Rhetoric

Arwen Spicer

University of Oregon (USA)
Keywords: Lit theory, ecocriticism/literature and environment, science fiction, utopia, dialogism/Bakhtin, and Victorian England
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Jennifer Stokes

University of South Australia (Australia)
Keywords: Cultural studies, film studies, digital media, feminist theory and animation studies
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Meghan K. Winchell

Nebraska Wesleyan University (USA)
Meghan K. Winchell is Associate Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln where she teaches courses that cover twentieth-century US history as well as women's history and African American history. She has taught a full-length Buffy course as part of NWU's Liberal Arts Seminar program for the past five years. Winchell has also presented her ideas about Buffy and pedagogy at several Slayage conferences. She is the author of Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War Two (North Carolina, 2008).

Kristopher Karl Woofter

Concordia University (Canada)
Kristopher teaches in the English Department at Dawson College in Montréal, Québec, and is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montréal. His academic interests in cinema, television and literature include the horror genre, the Gothic, folk and fairy tales, pseudo-documentary, new media, apocalypticism, and narrative. Kristopher has taught episodes of Buffy in the context of the Gothic and the horror film, and has a chapter on using Buffy in the classroom in the anthology, Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer (McFarland, 2010). Kristopher also serves as a co-chair for the Horror Area of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association.

Keywords: Film studies, television studies, genre studies, new media, horror, Gothic, folklore, fairy tale, pseudo-documentary, mock-documentary, fake-documentary, realism, reality styles, apocalypticism, narrative, cultural studies