Mary Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Queen's University. She is primarily interested in creative writing and children's literature, with a focus on ecofeminist approaches to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century girls' fiction.
Ecocriticism (particularly ecofeminism); climate and environmental humanities; genre fiction; food studies; girlhood and body image; animal studies; mental health; coming-of-age stories; Victorian and Edwardian literature; juvenilia.
Conferences
2024: Spooktastic Book Festival, Boston
Panel: Writing Horror for Children
2024: International Young Scholars' Conference, University of Stettin (Virtual Conference)
Panel: Representations of Animal Bodies and the More-than-Human World
Paper: Unscientific Creatures: Becoming Girl, Becoming Animal in 19th and Early 20th Century Children’s Literature
2023: ACCUTE, York University, Ontario
Panel: When the Body Speaks: Expressions of Bodily Pain in Creative Writing
Paper: What Does It Mean For A Body To Be Wrong?: Dysmorphia and Healing in Children's Verse Novels
2021: Research Ethics Conference, University of Exeter (Virtual Conference)
Poster: I Dream Regardless: Ethics, Ambition, and Emergent Genres in Adolescent Fiction
2021: Kaleidoscope, University of Cambridge (Virtual Conference)
Theme: Responding to Ruptures: Speaking Back to Power
Poster: Darkly, Academia: Reclamations of Power in the Transgressive Spaces of Young Adult Literature
Academic Publications
[Forthcoming]: "All The Wild Was Ready To Make Friends: Ecofeminist Childhoods in Barbara Newhall Follett's The House Without Windows." Chapter in Women Who Write Animals: Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World, edited by Lorraine Kerslake and Diana Villanueva. Brill Press.
[Forthcoming]: "Render Her A Tempting Morsel: Unholy Appetites and Disordered Bodies in Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire." Chapter in Disability and the Vampire, edited by Brooke Cameron and Drumlin Crape. Routledge.
[Accepted]: "The Scientific Fairy Tales of Lewis Carroll and John Cargill Brough." Chapter in Bugs and 19th Century Eco-Literature, edited by Brooke Cameron and Michaela Wipond.
Short Fiction/Poetry
2024: "wound maintenance." The Angle. Summer 2024.
2024: "heartwood genesis." ROOM Magazine. Issue 46.4.
2022: "Last House." FreeFall Magazine. vol. 32. no.1. (Environmental Special Issue)
Novels
[Forthcoming] 2025: The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay, G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House
2024: The Curse of Eelgrass Bog, Razorbill/Penguin Random House
