Sarah Fanning

Director of Drama; Assistant Professor
Office
PCCA 109

Biography

Dr Sarah Fanning is Director of Drama and Assistant Professor of Drama. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Brontë Studies. Dr Fanning teaches in the Screen Studies Minor, including Introduction to Screen Studies, Page to Screen, Mental Health on Screen, and Crime on Screen. Dr Fanning has taught literature and film courses at universities in both Canada and Britain. Her main research and teaching areas focus on film and television, adaptations of literary works, the Brontës, true crime, Neo-Victorian studies, gender, and mental health.

Publications

Publications

Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime, and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire O'Callaghan.

“‘What Follows is Based on Actual Case Files’: Adapting the “Truth” in David Fincher’s Zodiac”, in Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime, and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire O’Callaghan.

"A Post-Feminist Hero: Sandy Welch's North & South (BBC, 2004)." Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama . Edited by Julie Anne Taddeo, James Leggott, and Katherine Byrne. London: IB Tauris, 2018.

"The Many Faces of Jane Eyre: Film Cultures and the Frontiers of Feminist Representation." Brontë Studies: Special Issue: Charlotte Brontë: 'The business of a woman's life'  43.1 (January 2018): 41-54.

"'A Soul Worth Saving': Post-Feminist Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century Televised Adaptations of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ." Adaptation  10.1 (March 2017): 73-92.

"Adapting the Nineteenth Century." Conference Report. Literature Film   Association Newsletter  3.1 (February 1, 2009): 5-7.

"Review of Sarah Wootton's Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and Screen Adaptation." Romanticism 25.1 (April 2019): 113-116.

Editor in Chief, Bronte Studies (Taylor & Francis / Routledge)

"Inventing Emily: The Mythography of the Biopic." Brontë Studies : Special Issue: Emily Brontë:A Peculiar Music . (April 2020).

#Bronte2020, Co-organizer: global online fundraising event for the Bronte Parsonage Museum's Covid Appeal:

    BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-53950183
    CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/mount-allison-bronte-museum-1.5709340

Book Chapter: "Bad or Mad? Branwell Brontë, Mental Health, and Alcoholism in Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible (2016)." Co-author: Dr. Claire O'Callaghan. Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Costume Dramas . Edited by Julie Taddeo, James Leggott, and Katherine Byrne. Manchester University Press, 2022.

Forthcoming

A Very Short Introduction to the Brontës (Oxford University Press, 2025)

“Inventing Emily: The Mythography of the Biopic” in The Routledge Companion to the Brontës (Routledge, 2027), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire O’Callaghan.

The Routledge Companion to the Brontës (Routledge, 2027), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire O’Callaghan.

Works in Progress

Monograph: Screening Brontë Men: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights from Hollywood's Golden Age to the Dark-Heritage Film.

Conference Papers

"Inventing Emily: The Mythography of the Biopic." The 2018 Emily Brontë Bicentenary Conference, York (U.K.), September 2018

"Reclaiming the Brontës: Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible  (2016)." The Association of Adaptation Studies 12th Annual Conference, Leicester (U.K.), September 2017

"The Many Faces of Jane Eyre: Film Cultures and the Frontiers of Feminist Representation." The 2016 Charlotte Brontë Bicentenary Conference, Manchester (U.K.), August 2016

"For Crying Out Loud: Men, Emotion and the Screen." 4th Annual Association of Adaptation Studies Conference, BFI, London, September 2009

"The Characterization of Rochester in the BBC's Jane Eyre (2006)." "Adapting the Nineteenth Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past," University of Wales, Lampeter (U.K.), August 2008

Peer Reviewer

Bibliographical Society of Canada

Brontë Studies (Taylor & Francis)

Guest Editor

Brontë Studies: Special Issue: Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music. (April 2020)

Education

B.A. (Saint Mary's University)

M.A. (University of New Brunswick)

Ph.D. (University of Exeter, 2013)

Teaching

Fall 2024

SCRN 1001 - Introduction to Screen Studies

SCRN 4001 - True Crime

 

Winter 2025

ENGL/SCRN 2001 - Adaptation: Page to Screen

SCRN 3991 - Madness & Monstrosity

Research

Research Interests: Literary adaptation; eighteenth and nineteenth century novel (especially women novelists); Victorian culture; social history; gender studies; gothic fiction; visual culture; film and television narrative; genre; masculinity in women’s writing; literature in art; script analysis; heritage film and television; cultural studies.

Grants, awards & honours

Lori Mahen Memorial Scholarship 2001

Danai Spirospoulous Award 2001

School of Graduate Studies Award 2004 DWL Earl Fellowship 2004