Emily Alder

editor of The Captain of the Polestar & The Parasite

It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you in all its gruesome reality.

The Captain of the Pole-Star

Emily Alder is Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, where she teaches literature, film, popular culture, and ecocriticism from the nineteenth century to the present. She completed her doctoral thesis on British weird fiction author William Hope Hodgson in 2009, and worked as an academic skills adviser until gaining her first academic post at Edinburgh Napier University in 2012. Emily also tutored as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University in Scotland for several years. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and studied part-time for a PGCert in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, awarded in 2014.

Emily is an interdisciplinary researcher whose interests lie in literature and science and the environmental humanities, especially in the nineteenth century and in Gothic, weird, and science fiction. Spoken, written and visual narratives communicate, construct, and help us to understand individuals, materials, and practices in the social and physical world around us, and Emily’s research seeks to learn more about these relationships in the contexts of genre fiction, science, and environmental problems. Her first monograph, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, is published with Palgrave Macmillan in early 2020. Other publications include a number of essays, articles, and edited volumes on nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Gothic and science-fiction, although her writing also occasionally ventures into contemporary sf and children’s literature. Emily is editor of the journal Gothic Studies and membership secretary for the British Society for Literature and Science. Outside work, Emily is a keen cyclist, hillwalker and ski mountaineer.