Melissa Edmundson Makala

Senior Lecturer

Contact
Department of English
Office: 604 Strode
Website: https://clemson.academia.edu/MelissaEdmundson
Email: rmakala@clemson.edu

Education
Ph.D. English, University of South Carolina; M.A. English, East Carolina University; B.A. English and History, Barton College

Curriculum Vitae

Courses
British Literature, British and American Women Writers, World Literature

Research Interests
19th and 20th-century British women writers, gender and empire, women's supernatural fiction, ghost stories

Dr. Melissa Edmundson Makala specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s supernatural fiction. She is the author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She has edited several critical editions for Handheld Press, including Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (2019) and Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937 (2020). Her single-author critical editions spotlight the supernatural and imaginative short fiction of D.K. Broster, Clotilde Graves, Elinor Mordaunt, Alice Perrin, Charlotte Riddell, and Helen de Guerry Simpson.

Awards
2021 English Department Holman Research Award

Selected Professional Works

Books (Published)

Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Wales Press, 2013.

Books (Edited)

Helen Simpson, The Outcast and The Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925-1938. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Handheld Press, 2022.

D. K. Broster, From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Handheld Press, 2022.

Charlotte Riddell, The Uninhabited House. Edited with an introduction and notes by Melissa Edmundson. Broadview Press, 2022.

Elinor Mordaunt, The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Handheld Press, 2021.

Clotilde Graves, The Vanished Hand and Others. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Swan River Press, 2021.

Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-out. Co-edited with Ruth Heholt. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891-1937. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Handheld Press, 2020.

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Handheld Press, 2019.

Avenging Angels: Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers. Edited with an introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Victorian Secrets Publishing, 2018.

Dinah Mulock Craik. 1851. The Half-Caste: An Old Governess's Tale. Edited and with a new introduction by Melissa Edmundson. Broadview Press, 2016.

The Gothic Tradition in Supernatural: Essays on the Television Series. McFarland, 2016.

Alice Perrin. 1901. East of Suez. Edited and with a new introduction by Melissa Edmundson Makala. Victorian Secrets Publishing, 2011.

Journal Articles & Book Chapters (Published)

“Revising the Romance: Depictions of Biracial Women and Mixed Marriage in Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction,” in Imperial Middlebrow, Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch (eds.), Brill, 2020, pp. 159-177.

“‘Lest We Forget’: The Literary Works of North Carolina’s First World War Soldiers,” in North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War, Shepherd W. McKinley and Steven Sabol (eds.), University of Tennessee Press, 2018, pp. 137-151.

“‘Buyer Beware’: Haunted Objects in the Supernatural Tales of Margery Lawrence,” in The Female Fantastic: The Gendered Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, Elizabeth McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares (eds.), Routledge, 2018, pp. 50-64.

“Women Writers and Ghost Stories,” Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston (eds.), Routledge, 2017, pp. 69-77.

“‘Thought is everything’: Women’s Work in Rose Macaulay’s First World War Novels,” in Rose Macaulay: Writing Gender in Modernity, Kate Macdonald (ed.), Routledge, 2017, pp. 89-104.

“‘The cataclysm we all remember: Haunting and Spectral Trauma in the First World War Supernatural Stories of H. D. Everett,” Women’s Writing 23.4 (September 2016): 53-65.

“Alice Perrin.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sir David Cannadine (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2015.

“Land of the living that’s thronged with the dead”: Mary Kingsley and the Spirits of West Africa,” Special Issue of the Nineteenth-Century Supernatural, Supernatural Studies 2.2 (Summer 2015): 93-107.

“Between Two Worlds: Racial Identity in Alice Perrin’s The Stronger Claim,” Special Issue on Victorian India, Victorian Literature and Culture 42.3 (September 2014): 491-508.

“Supernatural Empire: The Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories of B.M. Croker and Alice Perrin,” in The Male Empire under the Female Gaze: The British Raj and the Memsahib, Susmita Roye and Rajeshwar Mittapalli (eds.), New York: Cambria Press, 2013, pp. 129-163.

“The ‘Uncomfortable Houses’ of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant,” Gothic Studies 12.1 (May 2010): 51-67.

“Bithia Mary Croker and the Ghosts of India,” The CEA Critic 72.2 (Winter 2010): 94-112.

Reviews & Interviews

“Supernatural Novellas by Victorian Women, A Reading List Chosen by Melissa Edmundson,” interview with Peter Meinertzhagen for Sublime Horror, 2 April 2020.

“Unquiet Spirits: The Lost Female Ghost-story Writers Returning to Haunt Us,” interview with David Barnett for The Guardian (London), 22 October 2020.

“Haunted Women,” interview with Eleanor McDowall for BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2019.

“Women’s Weird: Ghosts Must Be Real For The Author,” interview with Elizabeth Kim for Cunning Folk, 28 October 2019.

“The Ghost Story Gave Women a Voice,” interview with Peter Meinertzhagen for Sublime Horror, 24 February 2019.

“Ghost Stories by Victorian Women, A Reading List Chosen by Melissa Edmundson,” interview with Peter Meinertzhagen for Sublime Horror, 2 January 2019.

“Women’s Ghost Stories with Melissa Edmundson Makala,” interview with Charlotte Bond for the award-winning podcast Breaking the Glass Slipper, 31 May 2018.

“From Daphne du Maurier to Helen Oyeyemi, these are the female ghost writers you need to know about,” interview with David Barnett for The Independent (London), 27 October 2017.

Conference Presentations (Delivered)

Keynote Speaker for “Tales of Terror: The Gothic, Horror, and Weird Short Story,” (co-sponsored by the International Gothic Association and the University of Warwick), March 2019, Warwick, UK.

“‘Her Share in the New Comradeship’: Women’s Transcultural Reading Communities in Colonial India, 1880-1910,” SHARP Annual Conference, July 2018, Parramatta, Australia.

“Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire,” British Women Writers Annual Conference, June 2017, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

“Colonial Crime Scenes: The Australian Ghost Stories of Mary Fortune,” British Women Writers Annual Conference, June 2016, Athens, Georgia.

“Regenerating Images of Race in Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction Dust Jackets, 1900-1950,” SHARP Annual Conference, July 2015, Montreal, Canada.