Cassandra Whittem graduated with a Master of Arts from The University of Melbourne in December 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Stephanie Trigg, Prof. Peter Otto and Dr Stephanie Downes. Cassandra received her BA (Hons) in Literary Studies from Deakin University in 2015. Her Honours thesis was titled ‘You’d think the Devil Were Among Them: Psychosis in John Webster’s Tragedies’. In it, she applied a Lacanian framework for psychosis to the plays of John Webster, to form an interpretation of the violence and horror-elements therein.
Her research interest is on horror and the representation of fear in historical fiction. Her MA research mapped the changes in the representation of the ghost in literary culture over a three-hundred-year period. It focused on the discourses of fear that surround these representations, and what these discourses reveal about cultural attitudes towards fear, and the ghost, in the past.
Contact
cassandrawhittem@gmail.com
Research
Haunting Fear: A Literary History of the Ghost from the Medieval to the Gothic Era