Areas of expertise
London-based fantasy and science fiction; literary London; Victorian literature; scientific romance; the Christmas Book; twentieth-century literature; contemporary literature; Charles Dickens; H. G. Wells; George Orwell; Mervyn Peake; Michael Moorcock; Neil Gaiman; China Miéville.
Courses taught
London in the Literature of the Fantastic,
Deciphering the City: The Urban Detective Story,
A City of Spell Books and Broomsticks: London in the Literature of the Fantastic (Pre-College Global Scholars Programme),
London's East End (orientation)
Bio
Dr. Hadas Elber-Aviram is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Notre Dame London. She is the author of Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), which was a finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies. Her monograph charts the development of fantastical London literature across the fictions of Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville, examining their fascination with the materiality of the city, their belief in the fantasy genre as an idiom that can affect social change, and their conviction that for good or ill, the future of humanity lies in the metropolis. Hadas has published articles and chapters (peer-reviewed) on topics ranging from Dickens’s influence on Mervyn Peake and China Miéville, to H. G. Wells’s fantastical London, to the representation of vampires in science fiction, to the affiliations between urban archaeology and urban fantasy, to post-Brexit science fiction, to Judeofuturisms in the work of Lavie Tidhar.
Select Works
Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Published by Bloomsbury Academic.
'Slipping through history as though changing pyjamas: Judeofuturisms in Lavie Tidhar's science fictions' (co-authored with Jim Clarke), in Jim Clarke and Sümeyra Buran (eds), Religious Futurisms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming c. 2023).
'Rewriting universes: post-Brexit futures in Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe quartet', Humanities 10, no.3 (2021), Special Issue on Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future? DOI: 10.3390/h10030100
Playing with the prism’s light (in Hebrew, 2006). Omer, Israel: Fire and Steel Publishers, 2006. (Playing with the Prism’s Light is the first Israeli interactive novel to be published in the past two decades. Nominated for the Gefen Award for Israeli Fantasy 2007.)