Renée Fox (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Literature, the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, and Co-Director of the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches classes on the gothic, vampires, mummies, Harry Potter, Victorian literature, and Irish literature. With Michael Chemers, she also co-directs the UCSC Center for Monster Studies. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023), co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of the forthcoming Race, Violence, and Form in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Her other publications include essays and articles on topics ranging from Victorian acrobats to Dracula's gothic realism to epitaphic form in Irish poetry, and she's currently at work on a new book entitled Violent Reading: 19th-Century Ireland and the Politics of Genre.

Michael Chemers (MFA, PhD) is Professor of Dramatic Literature in, and Chair of, the Department of Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz. Formerly the Founding Director of the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dramaturgy Program at Carnegie Mellon University, he joined the faculty of UCSC in 2012. He is the author of Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010/2023), Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), and several books on monsters in performance including The Monster In Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (Oxford, UK: Routledge 2018). Dr. Chemers is the Founding Director of the UCSC Center for Monster Studies. He also works extensively with El Teatro Campesino as a dramaturg, actor, fight choreographer, and Scholar-in-Residence. Dr. Chemers is also a writer of drama who has adapted A Christmas Carol, for money, two times.