About the Association

Established in 2017 by Professor Fiona Peters, the association is now a flourishing community. The highly anticipated Captivating Criminality conferences have been running since 2014 worldwide and have led to the release of Crime Fiction Studies, an innovative new journal published with Edinburgh University Press and the first of its kind in the UK.

Our Team

Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University)

Director of the International Crime Fiction Association and Co-Editor of Crime Fiction Studies

Fiona Peters is a Professor in Crime Fiction at Bath Spa University in the UK. Her research in the area of crime fiction, including that on the crime writer Patricia Highsmith is internationally recognised. Her 2011 monograph Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith (Ashgate) has been described as ‘the first proper academic study of this underrated author’ and has been adopted as set reading in universities across the United States. Subsequently, Prof. Peters was invited to guest edit a volume of the prestigious ‘Clues’ journal, ‘Patricia Highsmith: A Re-evaluation’, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Highsmith’s death. This volume was published in November 2015.

Since then she has been a keynote at several international conferences, established the International Crime Fiction Association (from 2017) and the Captivating Criminality conferences (from 2014) and published widely in the are of crime fiction. In 2019 she established the Edinburgh University Press journal Crime Fiction Studies of which she is editor.

Her other research interests include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Evil Studies and Gender Studies. She is currently working on a monograph with Routledge, Collective Obsession: Representations of Evil in True Crime Narratives, and Crime Fiction: An Introduction (EUP).

Linda Ledford-Miller (Professor Emerita of the University of Scranton)

Coordinator of Annual Book Prize and Reviews Editor

Dr. Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavours. She continues to work across cultures and continents according to where her interests take her. She has published widely on Travel Writing and American Minority writers. Her recent work focuses on Crime Fiction, including Robert Downey Jr.’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, gender roles in the In Death series by the American J.D. Robb, the village mysteries of the Canadian Louise Penny, the philosophical Inspector Espinosa series by the Brazilian Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and the stand alone crime novel by the Mexican Laura Esquivel, best known for the smashing success of her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989).

Keli Masten (Ferris State University)

Association Blog Editor

Keli Masten is an instructor of Composition and Literature at Ferris State University after finishing her PhD in English from Western Michigan University in 2019. Her dissertation, Called Forth by Imminent Dangers: The American Gothic in Mysteries of Detection and Detective Fiction (1799-1929) is a radical reconsideration of generic development, arguing that American detective fiction grows out of the gothic tradition. Her article “Cherchez la Femme: A Good Woman’s Place in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction” is also a reframing effort, displacing the attention paid to the femme fatale and instead focusing upon the femme fiable, the dependable female sidekick, in Hammett and Chandler (Clues: A Journal of Detection 2018). Other writing projects include violence as social commentary, gendered social norms, and resurrecting the forgotten work of American author, Anna Katharine Green.

Marie Höfler

Content Creator - ICFA Social Media

Marie Höfler is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg, building on her teacher training in English and Spanish. Her thesis explores representations of female embodiment in contemporary feminist fiction, examining how these works challenge both the physical and mental restrictions imposed on women by patriarchal structures.

She joined the ICFA Social Media team after attending Dr. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein’s lecture, “Gender, Sex, and Crime (Fiction),” in the winter term of 2024/2025, which sparked her interest in crime fiction, particularly in its intersections with feminism and gender studies.

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg)

Co-Editor and Reviews Editor for Crime Fiction Studies

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a research assistant and post-doc at the Department of English Literature at the University of Bamberg and co-editor of Crime Fiction Studies. Her research interest in Crime Fiction lies in English Golden Age detective fiction and late 19th-century crime writing with a focus on gender representation. Among other topics, she has worked on Gothic and (political) Gothic parody of the long eighteenth century, trauma in the poetry of the Great War, and socio-political criticism in Star Trek fanfiction, and is currently working on her post-doc project on masculinities and femininities in Golden Age Crime Fiction. Her PhD dissertation, Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody: Framing the Subversive Heroine, focused on the topic of female normatisation in the Gothic novel versus the Gothic parody. Her latest books, Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality: New Directions in Gothic Studies co-edited with Sarah Faber (Routledge) and Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities: Proceedings of the Eighth Captivating Criminality Conference appeared in March 2024. She is currently working on a Routledge edited collection on Teaching Gothic Literature Now.

After discovering the Captivating Criminality conferences a few years ago and joining the ICFA, Kerstin has eagerly embraced the chance of writing her postdoc project on crime fiction. She has since worked on the representation of gender roles in Golden Age and neo-Golden Age crime fiction. The topic of the 2021 Bamberg conference, Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities, was a direct result of her fascination with the topic of gender in crime fiction.

In 2021, Kerstin joined Crime Fiction Studies as an assistant editor and became full editor in 2024. Together with Linda Ledford-Miller, she also runs the book review team. In the same year, she became a member of the ICFA book prize jury. She is also part of the newsletter team and the ECR/PGR team and organised Captivating Criminality 8 and will organise Captivating Criminality 13 (2026) in Bamberg, Germany.

Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University)

Coordinator of Annual Book Prize

Ruth Heholt is Associate Professor of Dark Economies and Gothic Literature at Falmouth University. Her research interests focus around crime, the Gothic, gender, Victorian, and Cornish studies. She is author of Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics (Routledge, 2020) and co-author of Gothic Kernow: Cornwall as Strange Fiction (Anthem Press, 2022). She is co-editor of several collections: Gothic Animals (2018), Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (2018), The Victorian Male Body (2018), and Haunted Landscapes (2017). She has organised international conferences including Folk Horror in the Twentieth Century (Falmouth and Lehigh Universities 2019) and is editor of the peer reviewed journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.

Lara Elisabeth Brändle

Content Creator - ICFA Social Media

Lara E. Brändle is a student at the Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg finishing her Master's degree in English and American Studies. Her thesis deals with women who kill in Victorian fiction and in how far their transgression is contextualised as madness in different modes, thus allowing it to be read as more or less critical of contemporary gender norms. She has been involved with the ICFA since volunteering as a student helper for Captivating Criminality 8 in Bamberg in 2022. After finishing her Master’s degree, Lara wants to pursue a PhD in English Literature investigating the construction of motherhood and femininity in twenty-first-century Neo-Victorian novels.

Stewart King (Monash University)

Co-Editor of Crime Fiction Studies

Stewart King is Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia, and is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Originally trained in Spanish and Catalan literary studies, since 2013 he has pioneered the study of crime fiction as world literature. In crime fiction studies, he is the author of Murder in the Multinational State: Crime Fiction from Spain (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2019), The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020), winner of the 2020 ICFA Book prize, The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction (2022), and the journal Crime Fiction Studies (Edinburgh University Press). He is currently leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on “World Crime Fiction: Making Sense of a Global Genre” (DP240102250).

Emily Farmer (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Associate Editor for Crime Fiction Studies, Social Media Coordinator, and ICFA Website Manager

Emily Farmer is currently a PhD student at Hong Kong Baptist University in their English department, researching expressions of civilised violence between the underdogs of contemporary nordic noir fiction. Her research will take an interdisciplinary approach, calling on gender studies, violence scholarship, socio-cultural factors, and crime fiction criticism to achieve her research project.

As the Social Media Coordinator for the International Crime Fiction Association Emily participates in content creation as well as managing the social media team and the Association's website. Emily also assists Professor Fiona Peters, Dr. Stewart King and Dr. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein with editing Crime Fiction Studies.

Oliver Eccles (University College London)

Associate Editor of Crime Fiction Studies

Oliver Eccles is currently completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London. His research is an unusual juxtaposition of the earliest detective fiction to emerge from both Japan and Argentina, probing unexpected parallels and commonalities in the genre’s transnational spread. His interests broach narratology, translation studies, material studies and field theory.

Oliver obtained a Masters in Comparative Literature at King’s College London, and read French and Spanish at New College, Oxford. His interests (linguistic, geographic, generic) are by no means limited to those mentioned above!

Oliver is an Associate Editor of the Crime Fiction Studies journal.

Kristina Alexandra Steiner

ICFA Newsletter Writer

Kristina Steiner is an MA student of English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg. She obtained her BA in English, Communication Studies and Business Administration from the same university. She works at the department of Communication Studies as a student assistant and is currently writing her MA thesis on representations of childhood, trauma, and narratology in twentieth-century children’s fiction about WW2. Beyond children’s literature, she is also interested in Victorian detective fiction, Sensation fiction as well as their intersections with press history. Her previous projects have been dedicated to the development of the Victorian popular press, focusing on newspaper crime reporting and its impact on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crime fiction.

At Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (2021) in Bamberg, Kristina was headed up the design team and contributed an academic poster.

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