Sarah Fanning
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.
ââWhat Follows is Based on Actual Case Filesâ: Adapting the âTruthâ in David Fincherâs Zodiacâ, in Serial Killing on Screen: Adaptation, True Crime, and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire OâCallaghan.
"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
CBC
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)
âInventing Emily: The Mythography of the Biopicâ in The Routledge Companion to the BrontĂ«s (Routledge, 2027), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire OâCallaghan.
The Routledge Companion to the BrontĂ«s (Routledge, 2027), edited by Sarah E. Fanning and Claire OâCallaghan.
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 womenâs 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