Please join us on June 19th for a keynote talk on Alice Kipling’s Haunted Life by Melissa Edmundson Makala (Clemson University, USA.) for the Global Ghosts and Regional Hauntologies International Symposium; a two-day research discussion and exchange on British and Indian ghosts.

This Talk is chaired by Dr Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University) and has been made a public event by symposium coordinators at:

Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

St Teresa’s College, Ernakulum, Kerala, India.

This is an international event. Please be aware of the following time zones and join the event accordingly:

12.30-13.30pm (BST)

5.00-6.00pm (IST)

About Melissa Edmundson Makala

Melissa Edmundson is Senior Lecturer of English at Clemson University and specializes in 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 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 editions include the supernatural and imaginative short fiction of D. K. Broster, Clotilde Graves, Elinor Mordaunt, E. Nesbit, Charlotte Riddell, and Helen de Guerry Simpson. Her work on British women’s Anglo-Indian fiction includes two critical editions, Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901), published by Victorian Secrets Press in 2011, and a Broadview Edition of Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste (1851) published in 2016.

About the Talk

Alice “Trix” Kipling (1868-1948) was shaped by her time in Anglo-India and wrote stories and novels influenced by the British colonial experience. Her ghost story “The Haunted Cabin” appeared in the collaborative volume Quartette (1885) alongside stories by her brother Rudyard, followed by “At a Christmas Ball,” published in 1892. Later in life, Alice became increasingly interested in the occult, particularly the belief in “second sight” and automatic writing. These interests led her to become active in the Society for Psychical Research under the alias “Mrs. Holland.” This talk will explore the life and supernatural writings of Alice Kipling and consider how adding another Kipling to the list of those who wrote Anglo-Indian ghost fiction can enrich our understanding of this Gothic subgenre.